


Party Before The Curtain

by InMyOwnHeadItGoesLikeThis



Series: Acts Around The Curtain [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:07:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29819853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InMyOwnHeadItGoesLikeThis/pseuds/InMyOwnHeadItGoesLikeThis
Summary: I love the idea that Giles influenced and corrupted Ethan, as much as the other way around. It's an angle that's missed a lot by other writers exploring this subject. I know there's a lot of 'what Giles got up to in the 70's' fics, but that's because it's great material and I hope you'll enjoy my take on it. In summary: Giles saves Deirdre from a demon, the gang save Giles from an overdose and some Council heavies. Stick with it after the opening fight scene and it becomes more of a character study of members of the group as they think about the world that has just opened up to them. For Ethan it's an opportunity to find out about the magic he has always known is there but has never been able to access - about what he is willing to do and what bargain he is willing to strike to get to it and to keep Giles with him long enough to find out what he needs to know. Broadly cannon compliant if you accept Giles / Ethan (and if you haven't considered it before do, they make an excellent couple) though in this one it's more of a suggestion of things to come. Also has my own take on why Giles started his Watcher training so early. Mature for swearing (lots of), sexual language, suggestions of childhood trauma, drugs and alcohol.
Relationships: Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne
Series: Acts Around The Curtain [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2192049
Kudos: 2





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> London, very early 1970's. There are hopefully more parts to come, so contains some set ups for later.

If Ethan leant back against the moulding brick of the wall he could just about stand out of the rain. He had to tilt his had up and tuck the long flaps of his scruffy coat behind his knees but it was do-able. Uncomfortable, but do-able and better than standing out in the piss-pour of the overhead gutter and the hammering rain. It was falling hard enough to cause concussion, or at least squash down his hair and he’d fought a tough fight with Dee for the one heated jug of water out the kettle. His coat might be scruffy but, that aside, he was looking pretty outstanding tonight. A bit of discomfort was worth it to preserve his appearance, at least until they set off for home. He wasn’t in a rush.  
Pressed between a crappy wall and his own personal waterfall, Ethan was quite happy. He liked this rainy darkness. Even in this shitty bit of town there was the odd working street light making on orange bulb in the wet, like a strange glowing fruit on a silver tree. The beat of the record player in the party up above was rhythmic and behind the ingrained smell of the street itself he could smell the wet soot in the damp air. Not everyone’s favourite fragrance but he liked it. It spoke of fires somewhere, out there in the dark, it was like a smudgy curtain in front of a hidden sky of stars. Still, he never liked to go for too long without reminding the others he was there, so he lifted his voice to compete with the water.  
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could go now?”  
On the street Tommy looked up from where he had a friendly headlock around Phil. It was a long enough pause for Phil to tip the bottle he had been holding at arm’s length and stick his tongue towards the splurge of dregs that fell from it.  
“Ey, ey, bastard,” said Tommy cheerfully and clamped a hand over his friend’s cheeks. He squeezed his fingers so the dregs shot back out of Phil’s mouth, like a bad fountain or low budget Corporation Arts piece. Phil spluttered for a breath and made a noise that was some kind of combination of cough and choke. “We’re still waiting for Dee, same as last time you asked.”  
Ethan watched as Tommy shook his hair which was darkened by water and grotty second hand light. He could just about make out the motion and the drops as they shone a moment in the lights then dropped.  
“Oy, watch it,” a rather slurred voice came from just behind the other two. Trust Randall to only notice the wet not the glitter.  
“Shut up Randall, you wanker.”  
Tommy laughed at Phils’ casual rudeness and wrestled the bottle from his friend. A perfect drop kick, even in the dark. Tommy’s boot hit the bottle as it fell, flew waist height to the wall, shattered. More sparkles, rain and glass together.  
Ethan let it go for another few minutes whilst Tommy and Phil found more things to kick, their almost-drunk bodies making them impervious to rain. Already drunk, Randall shivered and complained under his breath, emptying another bottle. Ethan waited until Phil and Tommy were concentrating on balancing the smashed bottle head on the end of Tommy’s boot, and, in the moment when Phil was just about to kick it, shouted:  
“Do you think Dee’s conquest is having problems? Perhaps he can’t remember which way he pulls to get his trousers off, or where that handy zip in the front is.”  
Phil missed the bottle and went crashing over Tommy’s uplifted leg, sending the bottle neck flying from the boot.  
“Could be,” agreed Tommy, catching his friend and sagging a bit under the massive bulk, “or perhaps he’s just thorough.”  
“No one whose drunk four pints of dirty cider is that thorough,” said Phil, pulling out a packet of cigarettes, frowning as the rain drummed on the carton.  
“Good point,” Ethan looked through the water to the sulking shiver that was Randall. “I suggest we send someone to go and offer him some assistance. Randall doesn’t appear to be up to much.”  
Good idea,” Phil’s voice was muffled by the cigarette in his mouth and the jacket over his head, protecting the lighter. “Off you go Randall.”  
“Yes, off you go, offer him a hand.” Tommy’s face was really quite cherubic, which is why he could make anything sound dirty.  
“Fuck off.”  
“Go on, you might learn something. He might even give you some tips.” Tommy lit his own cigarette from Phil’s. Ethan could see the points of light, he really wanted a smoke but that would mean moving his hands and that would mean breaking his perfect dry spot.  
“I said fuck off. Hey-”  
That ‘hey’ was a different tone, not part of the usual back and forth, which was quite good natured for their nature by Phil and Tommy and Ethan, and quite indignant by Randall. That ‘hey’ was fully indignant, it was surprised. Though he tried to hide it and to appear permanently unimpressed by everything in existence, Ethan was as curious as a cat. He was in-fact very like a cat, liking to look and touch and even on rare occasions display his affections but only ever on his own terms. If he caught anyone watching or been in any way amused by his curiosity he would become one long and elegant sulk.  
“I said hey, fucking watch it, fucker.”  
Randall really did need to work on his insults, though Ethan as he leaned sideways slightly and tried to see more of the street.  
“He said ‘fucking watch it, fucker.”’  
Tommy’s voice was an education. One that someone like Randall should really sign up for classes in. It managed to be both a growl and a shout. There was no way you should be able to do those two things at the same time but Tommy managed it. Tommy had a long history of shouting after people down streets.  
There was no reply. Whoever, whatever had bumped into Randall it was silent.  
“Oy fucker.”  
Nothing. No, a wet, white shirt, almost see-through in the rain.  
“S-s-sorry.”  
Posh voice, didn’t sound sorry. Sounded like it had said sorry out of some kind of ingrained habit. By the time it had got the ‘s’ passed its stammer he had already moved on, leaving the un-meant apology behind him.  
The three other men in the street burst into crowing calls of “S-s-s-s-orry, s-s-s-soreeeee. I’ll make you s-s-s-sorry mate.” Ethan frowned a bit, uncomfortable, but the heavy steps of the white shirt didn’t break. The front door to the flats was nudged open by a foot, Ethan had the vague impression that, whoever it was, he was carrying something. There was a light in the entrance lobby but it didn’t make it out past the door. The man in the wet shirt carried on inside, as oblivious to the young men in the street as they in turn had been to the rain.  
“We’ll get him on the way out,” said Tommy, philosophically, flicking his stub at the door and lighting the next.  
“It’s pissing wet, if we’re hanging around any longer we might as well go back in to the party.”  
“If we’re going in, we might as well get the bastard now. I say - ”  
They could tell the scream was Deirdre’s, even though they’d never heard her scream like that, even though they’d never heard anyone scream like that. It was loud enough to come through the thin brick walls of the building, it beat the heavy base of the music and scratched over it like a needle.  
“Bird!” shouted Tommy, falling into the most affectionate of their names for her. Bird, their bird. Dee, Deirdre. His just-lit cigarette sparked as he flicked it to the kerb. Ethan unpeeled himself from the wall, the gutter dumping a hand of soiled and freezing water down the neck of his coat.  
“Dee?” Tommy shouted again, Phil slightly ahead as they got to the door. It wasn’t locked, the lock was smashed off, easier than leaving the door propped open or coming down for every guest. Ethan let the other three pile in ahead of him. If pressed he would admit he was inordinately fond of Dee, she was probably the person he liked best in all the world. It was she that had brought him into this little gang of strangely dissimilar but overlapping personalities, she floated around their squat like a bright little bit of paper looking to be amused. But he was more willing to admit that he was not a fighter, had never learnt despite the number of fights other boys had tried to inflict on him growing up. His ability to take a beating wouldn’t be of much help. He fell in behind Randall, noticing the drops of rain on the boy’s coat like a pattern of random studs.  
“Help – oh, god.” Deirdre’s voice was breathless, gasping. They could hear her footsteps running on the stairs, a thud. The hallway was tiny, their four pairs of booted feet pounded up the stairs, Ethan’s black pointed toes the quietest. Half a flight and the stair case turned on a small landing under a weak electric bulb. Under the bulb the wet shirt of the stammering man turned orange then shadowed. He was ahead of them, carrying on up the stairs in the same, unbroken pace as on the street. If he had heard that scream it hadn’t bothered him. He wasn’t even looking. Ethan could see a bottle of whiskey in the man’s left hand, nearest the wall. What looked like small boxes, medicine size boxes, in the other. He wondered why he was so bothered by what the other man was carrying when Dee’s frantic breath was panting down the stairs.  
“Deirdre?”  
They were catching up. Tommy overtook Phil, reaching a hand for the bannister as he flung himself around the landing, up. The white shirt was a few steps ahead of them. Tommy looked up. And stopped. Phil crashed into the back of him, momentum pushing them both forward, only Tommy’s hand on the bannister stopped them from crashing chest-first into the stair. Randall swore, swerved, grabbing hold of Phil’s jacket.  
“Up,” he called, thinking they had fallen.  
“Fuck,” said Phil and really, fuck didn’t cover it but then nothing else did. The only other word was the one that flashed for the briefest of moments in Ethan’s mind. It was ‘ha.’ Short for ‘ha, I knew I was right.’ Like stars behind the city smoke, like a world behind a curtain that had finally fallen down, another reality was showing itself on the stairs. A reality that Ethan had always known was there, even if he had never been able to bring it to the front, to do more than shake the curtain and smell a little of the draft that came from behind it.  
There was Dee, half naked, dress rolled down to her waist and bra lost somewhere down the back of a sofa earlier in the night. So far, so normal. She was crouched down, legs stuck underneath her, hand groping ahead of her down the stairs, as though it was trying to will the rest of her body to follow it, to dive head first. She was keening, snot and makeup running down her face, her other arm raised above her. Her arm was thin, pale, glittery with bangles, shining with sweat. Her thin, long hand was crushed into a fist and around that fist was a bigger hand. That’s what Ethan noticed, the scale of the hand, then it’s colour, a sort of purple-dirt that reminded him of smudgy pictures when kids mixed up their paints. The hand had claws.  
Looking up at it, not one of them thought it was a costume, not even for a second. No costume looked that real, no costume had muscles like that, bulking and tight under the skin. No material could look that much like skin and it smelt, the realness of the smell hit them like a force. No one would be so dedicated to a costume that they would file their teeth to spikes or dye their tongue. It was long and purple like the body and it thrust out from between those teeth, curling at the end. Around the monster’s waist, like a gross parody of Dee’s rolled dress, was a human skin, split open and hanging loose. Ethan was surprised to hear his own voice say,  
“I told you he didn’t know how to take his trousers off.”  
The long thin tongue curled towards them, then the head of the monster snapped around and its four pure white eyes fixed on them.  
“Shit,” breathed Tommy.  
The white shirted man didn’t break his stride. The monster dropped Dee’s hand and took a step down, it’s nailed, purple foot thrusting through the human skin, wearing it like a clog. The white shirt took a step to the side, for all the world like someone trying to go around a tourist who was going the wrong way on the Underground stairs. The monster stepped aside and blocked him. The white shirt stepped back across and again the monster blocked him. It was almost comic, the obvious delight from the monster in finding something new to play with, the frustrated disinterest of the man. Dee grabbed hold of the banister and started to try and uncurl her legs. The man stepped again, the monster stepped and –  
He shouldn’t have been able to move that quick. Everything about that wet shirt had been so dislocated, so disinterested. Plodding nonentity with a stammer but now he had moved so quickly Ethan felt he was watching the last few seconds on a sort of play-back. The whiskey bottle shattering on the balustrade, glass and amber liquid falling as the hand came up and the gurgle the monster made as the broken end thrust into its neck. As a sound it was almost human. The monster gurgled again and the man dropped his hand. Stepped to one side, stepped around. Carried on with that heavy, lifeless walk up the stairs.  
He was two steps further up, Dee’s hand reaching out to instinctively clutch him around the ankles, when the monster moved.  
“Watch -” began Ethan but never got to ‘out.’ The man whipped around, ankle turning in Dee’s grip, bending impossibly backwards as the great claws of the monster slashed out. They whipped the air over his head but he was already rising, right hand up and through the monsters arms, grasping for the bottle-end, left hand smashing the thing across the face. It screamed. Screamed again, one of its great fists bashing at the man’s right arm, dislodging the bottle which thunked through the missing spindles and smashed itself below. A spurt of something bright, almost pink coloured, pulsed out of the slashed throat, the monster raised its hands towards the wound but the man was quicker. Not just quicker but quick. Both of his hands were up on the thing’s throat and Ethan couldn’t see, the bulk of the monster’s body blocked the view but there were gurgles and a sort of deep throated, breathless grunt from the man. The monster twisted on its feet, arms flailing, it seemed to be going on forever but Ethan had only felt four breaths, maybe five.  
The monster twisted around, feet slipping, body falling as it lost balance. The man twisted with it, thrust himself up by sticking a boring, incredibly boring plain black shoe into the monsters hip. No one, thought Ethan, no one who can move like that should have such boring shoes. Ethan could see now that the hands of the man weren’t on the monsters throat but in it, fingers deep in the jagged opening of the bottle cut. As the monster fell the weight of its own body pulled down the right hand and the thrust of the man’s body pulled up his left. There was a sound that mixed tearing and popping and cracking and wetness.  
The head of the monster bounced down the stairs.  
The man turned the energy of the pull into a spin, his foot landed lightly, facing him back up the stairs. Ethan heard the others scramble backwards away from the rolling head but he only had eyes for the back of the muscled rib cage he could see breathing in and out behind the shirt.  
After two or three breaths the breathing slowed. Phil swore as the head rolled into them in the close confines of the stair turn. The man stepped over the torso of the monster and picked up the medicine packets. He stepped over the shaking body of Deirdre and onto the landing. He opened the door opposite the stair-head with his foot, much as he had done downstairs. He kicked it closed behind him with his heel.  
At the top of the stairs Dee began to make a noise like a crying animal which turned, after a second or two, into words.  
“What in the holy fuck?” she said.

“Bird!” called Phil and made it up three steps before he slipped on the blood and skated backwards. Tommy caught him again, dropping the head and kicking it away. Ethan took a few steps backwards, a cat sliding away from a spill. There were thunks as Tommy and Phil began to make their way up the slippery stairs.  
“You saw that right?” said Randall, breaking their unwritten rule that they would only each tolerate the other if he permanently shut up.  
“Randall, I never see what you see. It would bore me.” He shouldered his way past him and picked his way up the stairs.  
“It’s alright Bird, s’all right.”  
Tommy flung his jacket off and gently put it over her chest as Phil grabbed her hand.  
“I’ve wet myself,” Dee’s hand gripped back at Phil’s. “I think I'm going to be sick.”  
“So, a normal night out then,” said Ethan. He crouched down by the dead torso, there were arteries and muscles streaming out of the neck hole like ribbons. Dee gulped and choked on a laugh. Her voice was shaking as violently as her body.  
“Where did he go, the ripping-the-heads-off-things-guy.”  
“In there,” said Tommy, gesturing vaguely upwards towards the shut door. “Can you stand up or shall I carry you, we should clear out.”  
“No, I want to say thank you.”  
“Are you fucking crazy?”  
“Don’t call me crazy, you know I’m not crazy.” Her voice had an edge to it, rising near to hysteria.  
“Course we know,” said Tommy, flashing Phil a glance for using the word, “but we’ll say thanks some other time, you’re all messed up and he didn’t look in the mood. Come on Bird, please”  
She consented and Tommy picked her up, not a hard task. Even Ethan could do that, she was tall but light, bird boned, easy to move and easy in her movements. Carefully they stepped over the torso, Phil shouting out to Tommy where to put his feet.  
“You all saw that right?” asked Randall as they got to the landing. Only Randall, thought Ethan, would see the realest things he had ever seen and then ask everyone else if he had seen them. They ignored him, turned onto the lower stair.  
Five men in suits were coming up it. They drew level with the head and its matching streamers of arteries and muscles. They went past it, one of them bending down to pick it up. He held it in his hands rather like an anthropologist looking at a good exhibit.  
“Rathma-Lorgennes Demon. I thought they were extinct.”  
“I would say they definitely are now, Travers. I think we can safely say we are in the right place.”  
They brushed past the gang on the stairs like they weren’t there. Ethan thought of the things that everyone went around not noticing because they just weren’t part of their world. Like rain, or monsters, or five nobodies on a stair. Only one of them stopped, the one holding the head. He looked at Dee and gave a nod with his head towards her. Ridiculously, the head of the monster nodded too in his hand as he unconsciously mimicked the gesture.  
“Is she alright?” he asked.  
“Yeah, she’s fine,” said Tommy in the gravelly growl voice that said back off, that said leave. That even if she isn’t fine, she’s ours to care about not yours. The man nodded again and carried on.  
“Come on,” said Randall but the others stayed still. A frown started to gather over Tommy’s brow. Once again at the back of the group Ethan leaned back a bit and watched the suits make their way past the torso.  
“Why do I feel like we’re the ones who aren’t the normal ones here?” asked Tommy.  
“We’re never the normal ones,” replied Phil.  
“No, I mean that they are the normal world and we’re the false one or something. Like everything tonight’s real and the normal world is the pretend one, or something – I don’t know.” Tommy broke off.  
“Come on,” said Randall again, impatient now, starting his way down. Ethan took a step back onto the landing, he could see the door now and the group of suits in front of it.  
“Giles, open the door,” said the one who had called the other Travers. Then, in a quieter voice, “it’s locked.” Then louder again. “Unlock the door Giles or we’ll break it down.”  
No good in a fight, Ethan would admit that, though he was excellent at starting them, sometimes all he had to do was show up and they broke out. Of course that might be a lot to do with the things he chose to wear and say and where he chose to wear and say them. He took a few more steps to the foot of the stair-turn.  
“Excuse me?” he shouted up to the suits.  
“Ethan you bollock brain, what are you doing?” Phil’s voice, like the rest of him, was too big for the staircase.  
“Excuse me but I was wondering if you were looking for the Stuffed Arse Annual All-Comers Ball?”  
“Ethan, we’ve got to get Dee home.” The ‘home’ was muffled as Ethan stretched up and behind him and clamped a hand over Phil’s mouth. For the second time that night, Phil felt his breath puffed out of his cheeks. The suits at the top of the stairs turned and looked down at him.  
“Only my friend Randall there, on the stairs, he was looking for it too, only he’s too embarrassed to go in. You see he hasn’t got a date. Now if one of you fancied-”  
There was an indignant shout from Randall further down the staircase.  
“Shut up Rayne, you’re the arse stuffer.”  
“Ignore him,” said the senior suit and turning back to the door he raised his voice again. “Open the door or we will kick it down.”  
Phil was right behind Ethan now, he could feel his breath.  
“Right, kick it down Travers.”  
“Yes sir, if someone could maybe just hold this head.”  
Ethan could see them re-arrange themselves then Travers took a step back to kick.  
“Hey,” shouted Phil and flung himself into a run. “Back off.”  
Tommy watched him for a second then ran after him, sliding Deidre into Ethan’s arms as he went.  
“Hold onto Bird.”  
The door opened at the first kick, there was nothing to it, the flimsy wood broke around the lock.  
“Hey, bastards,” yelled Tommy.  
Ethan sprang forward with them. At the top of the stairs was the world behind the curtain, there was no way he was going to let the curtain fall back down. At the top of the stairs was the boy who moved like that and who came from that world; and Dee was light and easy to carry and he was up the first few steps before he had thought about it. No decision, just instinct.  
“Us too?” said Dee, her bright spirit rising.  
Tommy and Phil weren’t like lots of other young men in how they fought. Tommy and Phil didn’t do that thing where the opponents charge up to each other then dance around swopping insults and flapped arms. Tommy and Phil ran in to a fight and fought, so Ethan had to give some points to the suits when they didn’t back off when the charge hit them. He had to give them more points for having both Tommy and Phil in arm and head locks before they’d got from the stair-head to the door. Both of them were shouting and swearing and the one called Travers swiped a leg under Phil, sending him crashing to the floor.  
“Charge, charge my dark steed,” yelled Deidre and they swept through, cannoning into Tommy and the suit that held him, gathering them up in their momentum. The senior suit was just stepping beyond the door which he had pushed from it twisted hinges. They swept him up too, pushing into him with a weight of bodies. There was a scramble at floor level as Phil broke free and skidded in behind.  
“What the -” said the senior suit, though he stopped short of swearing. “Oh for goodness sake get hold of them. Get hold of her, oh!”  
As she slipped down from Ethan’s arms, Tommy’s coat fell away from Dee, leaving her half naked again. The silence was an embarrassing one for the suits, a profitable one for Tommy as he broke free from his captor and picked Phil up off the floor.  
“Leave him alone, he saved me!” Dee’s long hair crashed down from the last of its pins as she dashed between the suits and the room’s occupant. Ripping-The-Heads-Off-Things-Guy, also apparently called Giles, who stood at the window looking out into darkness, not even turning around; still as a cut out figure and as flat. Ethan looked at the back of the head and wondered what the face looked like. He hadn’t seen it clearly in the dinginess of the stairs, he couldn’t see it now as it blurred in the black rain of the window.  
“Hemston, Wong, do something about this,” the senior suit gestured toward Dee, Ethan could see him reflected backwards in the window.  
“Yes sir. Cover yourself up Miss and get out, this doesn’t concern you.”  
“Yes it does!”  
“Stop fucking starring at her tits,” said Tommy, deliberately provoking.  
“This is ridiculous,” said the senior suit as Dee flapped Hemston away with a hand, like she was shooing away a naughty dog. “Rupert Giles, I’m -”  
“Rupert? He’s really called Rupert?” The voice of Randall, amused and derisive in the door.  
“That’s posh boys for you, they’ve got fucking posh names.”  
“Rupert Giles, I’m John Stanleys, Senior Operative,” the suit began again, tone harsher for the interruption. “I’ve been sent by the Council to bring you back and this time you will be coming with us. The Council have shown you great understanding and given you plenty of time to come back of your own accord. You have been asked by both your father and by a senior Watcher on behalf of the Council. Both those times you have refused and deliberately removed yourself elsewhere so we would have to find you again. You are wasting time and resources as well as showing blatant disregard for the organisation. I must now enact on a ruling of the Inner Council and bring you in by force if necessary. Five weeks is enough.”  
Nothing. The face stayed looking at the window, the body stayed as still. Ethan tore his eyes away from the glass to look at the breathing going on in the wet shirt. It was rapid, far too rapid for someone standing so still. Ethan felt a worry wash over him, colder than that dump of water from the gutter. It was a fear that had nothing to do with the suits or the strangeness of the night’s events. In his mind he saw the whiskey bottle shatter on the stairs but the hands drop to pick up the pill packets. There was nothing in the room but a sparse, unmade bed, a rug on the floor that was mainly dust, a wardrobe with no door and empty of clothes. Bottles, lining the side of the bed, the window ledge. Packets, lying around, more than just the handful from the stairs. All of them empty. The latest empty ones were under the hands on the window ledge.  
“How many did you take?” asked Ethan to the reflection. He felt everyone’s head turn towards him. Stanleys hand grabbed hold of Dee’s bangled wrist.  
“Hey, get off me!”  
“Right,” said Stanleys, gesturing towards the window, “get hold of him and lets go. We’ve wasted enough of my time here.”  
Which is when Dee punched him, hard and fast, in the groin.  
The face of every man in the room, with the possible exception of Giles’s which was hidden in the glass, scrunched up in a solidarity of pain. Then the solidarity was broken as Tommy and Phil made a collective jump for the nearest suit.  
“Randal get in here and fucking help,” yelled Tommy, crashing past Ethan at chest height. Dee had hold of Stanleys’ arm and was venting the night’s fear and anger onto his face. The smack of her palm against his skin was the loudest noise in the room. For the others the fight was too breathless to make much noise beyond contact and falls, though Ethan heard a click as Randall’s switch blade opened. Tommy liked a knuckle duster, Phil just using his bulk and whatever was handy.  
The suits didn’t need weapons, they seemed to know some sort of hand to hand Martial Arts, Ethan had no idea which. His only previous exposure to such stuff was late night films at the Odeon. Still, no black belt in the world could help you when someone the size of Phil has picked you up by the hair and run you face first into the edge of the wardrobe. There was a crunch as Hemston’s nose broke.  
In the window, the cut out figure that was Giles wobbled, like a breeze had come through the glass.  
“Erm,” said Ethan and stepped towards him, only there was someone grabbing him from behind, locking onto his arm. “Ow! Ow! Let me go you stupid bastards, he’s going to OD.” There was a smack of broken glass and the hand clutching him loosened slightly, enough for him to pull away as he heard Dee yell,  
“Let go of Ethan, he’s shit at fighting, be fair you stupid bastard.”  
The outline in the window crumpled. Ethan dived forward just in time to catch hold of the shirt before the body hit the floor.  
“Ah.”  
He dropped them both the last few feet to the dusty rug. The hair was thick, deliciously cold and wet, but shorn short. Too short, like someone had hacked at it, shaved it and it had only a month or so of un-styled growth. There was blood in it from the demon, he was unshaven, unwashed and scraps of purple flesh and viscera were flecked into his hair, his beard, the dark fineness of his eyelashes. The lids flickered and pulled back. Ethan realised he had never seen anybody in his life before who had truly green eyes. They rolled back and were white. The body began to shake.  
“Erm, help me, help me!” called Ethan, his voice not living up to the amount of panic that he felt. He could hear the fight behind him and it sounded like the pissed off and dirty school of fighting was winning over the trained.  
“Take that, fucker,” Tommy sounded almost cheerful, though out of breath, panting.  
“Help me, what do I do?” yelled Ethan.  
He scrambled around to see the others. Blood was streaming out of Randall’s nose, Tommy’s eye was cut, already swelling. You’d need a step ladder to get high enough to mark Phil’s face but his clothes were torn, his fists marked. Dee was standing like a budget action-film Boudicca, pink and purple splatter from the staircase swirling her like woad. The only suit left standing was Travers, who was defending a corner with the help of Randall’s knife. From the way he held it, it was obvious how easily he had got it from the younger boy. He raised it slightly as the three of them closed on him. On the floor, the suits rolled in various stages of bleeding.  
“Stop it, he’s OD’ing so stop it and help me. I don’t know what to do.”  
“Hold his head,” said Tommy, suddenly turning around and putting his back to Travers. He didn’t trust Travers not to lunge but he trusted Phil to deal with it. “And roll him on his side, you need to make him sick.”  
They rolled him, Dee rushing over to hold his head, Tommy pulling up the eyelids, checking.  
“Randall, come here and stick your fingers down his throat, I need to find some water and some salt or something.”  
“You stick your fingers down his throat.”  
“Oh just do it, help him Randall, please.” But Randall, out of all of them, was the only one immune to Dee’s charms.  
“Just do it.”  
“I’ll do it,” said Ethan, for the second time that night realising the words were his only when he’d heard them out loud. He hesitated for just a second then put his two painted finger nails in-between the other mans’ lips. They were dry and Ethan would remember afterwards how that first time he touched Giles’ flesh he felt nothing, no shock of contact, nothing. Only the texture of the lips and his own hesitation. He pushed the fingers beyond the white and very straight teeth and wondered if they were caps or if the man was simply good at ducking. There was no way that someone who fought like that had never got punched in the mouth, everyone starts off bad and learns, even if the only skill they learn is ducking.  
There was something in the man’s mouth. It felt like something tied around the tongue but Ethan had to use the word ‘something’ as he really couldn’t tell what it was. Only that it was – and no, it couldn’t be - but it was surely –  
“Ethan?” asked Dee.  
He’d have to find out later. Ethan shoved his fingers beyond the back of the mouth, pushed down. There was a retch and slightly warm liquid washed over his fingers, smelling of second hand alcohol. Ethan scrapped at the tongue but there was nothing to see. Still, his fingers told him something was there.  
“Right. Keep doing that.” Tommy made for the door. He pointed at Travers as he went. “Any of them move too much, smash them into a wall or something.”  
“Right,” said Phil.  
“I’ve got salt,” said Travers, helpfully.  
“What?”  
“I’ve got salt. Here.” He reached towards his pocket, stopping as Phil made a slight noise of warning. “That one here,” he said and pointed.  
Tommy came over, felt the outside of the raincoat that was over the suit. Frowned, reached in, pulled out a cross, a small glass phial, a wrapped brown bag big enough to hold a good two handfuls of salt.  
“What the holy fuck man?” He put his hand into the other pocket, there was a wooden stake. “Who the fuck carries this shit around with them.”  
Ethan heard the blurred mix of conversation behind him.  
“Just need water.”  
“Try the party.”  
“For water, are you fucking joking?”  
“No, they’ll have a glass and there was a sink.”  
It seemed unreal, like Tommy had said earlier. Unreal because other things seemed realer. The conversation was unreal because the man on the floor was realer. He was the realest thing Ethan had ever seen.  
“Thank you, for saving me,” cooed Dee, stroking the wet hair, “Did you want to sleep? You shouldn’t, you should stay awake. Stay awake sweetheart, your eyes are far too pretty to be closed, come on, stay awake.”  
Ethan let the sound of her drone in and out. There was a groan from on the floor behind them, one of the suits was pulling himself up on the bed.  
“I’d rather you didn’t throw him into a wall,” said Travers from his corner. “And I know Hemston sounded over dramatic when he told you that you don’t know what you’re messing with but you don’t. You should let me take Giles and take him to hospital.”  
“Yeah, so you and your suits can stop chasing him down?” asked Phil.  
“So he doesn’t die on your floor, do you really want to risk it?”  
Tommy reappeared, fingers splayed into six full pint glasses of water, three in each hand. A bottle of half-used up mustard was dropped into one of them, yellow label warping in the water. He looked at Travers. A suit whose name Ethan didn’t know, but might be the one that Dee had hit with the bottle, was also staggering up against the wardrobe, glass and blood in his hair.  
“Take your friends and go,” said Tommy.  
“I need to take Giles, you should let me.”  
“I’m not good at letting people do stuff, not when it’s take people away who don’t want to go. So fuck off before Phil bounces you against the floor.”  
Travers took them all in, carefully, then made up his mind.  
“I’ll go, but we will be back for Giles. When you’ve got him to throw up, leave him, we’ll find him wherever he is anyway but it will be quicker this way.”  
The rug was squishy with sick now and chunks of something unidentifiable were all over Ethan’s hand. He wondered why he didn’t feel repulsed. As Tommy began dumping the salt from the packet into the water he called back over to Travers who was helping a stunned suit to get up.  
“Why do you have salt and a stake in your pocket anyway?”  
Travers put his arm around his fellow Watcher, guiding him to the door. “Boiling potatoes and erecting small fences. I’ll come back up for the others, our van is just down the road. I won’t interfere in what you're doing.” Dee took the first glass of salt water and as Tommy levered the prone body up to sitting position, she began tipping it into the mouth. “Please, do as I say and leave him here.”  
They ignored him, tipping Giles forward as he vomited, the sick running down onto the shirt to mix with the rain and blood.

The tenth pint of water, this one mixed with mustard, and nothing was coming up but stomach acid. They poured another five pints of clear water down after them, though as it was straight from a London tap there was every chance it would make him retch as much as the salt and mustard. It didn’t and it stayed down, hopefully to wash out anything that had got beyond the stomach. Partly digested tablet-jackets floated in the liquid sick, the man couldn’t have eaten anything much for days. Looking at the bottles in the room, Ethan figured he hadn’t let food interrupt the drinking.  
“Is that everything up?” Deidre shoved her arms into her dress, pushing her breasts back into the tight fabric. She held them one handed, wiggling her other arm behind her for the zip.  
“Don’t know, not knowing how much he’s taken.” Tommy let the body drop back onto the floor. It hadn’t responded to them beyond the vomiting and a flicker of the eyelids.  
“He can’t have taken all of these at once,” said Phil, looking around the room, now empty of semi concussed and bleeding suits. Aspirin and Paracetamol packets still littered between the bottles “He’d be dead already.”  
“Probably been binging for days. We should make sure he eats something.” Tommy thought about it for a second. “We should take him home with us.”  
“Of course we should,” said Dee.  
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Randall sprang up from where he was slouched against the wall. Adrenaline gone he was left feeling only drunk, aware enough to know he’d had more than everybody else, just about enough not to care. He belched horribly, rubbing at his stomach, one of those kicks had really got him in the guts. He swore around the belch. “Shit. Fucking hell, sorry. Anyway, he’s not coming.”  
“Isn’t he?” said Tommy.  
They didn’t have a leader and Tommy wasn’t it. He couldn’t be, because they didn’t have one. But he was the leader all the same and they knew it.  
“Of course he is, he saved me.”  
“From a bad fuck?” Randal belched again, rubbing his stomach, a stab of pain crossing his face. “If we took home every guy that saved you from that, we’d have no fucking room.”  
“It wasn’t some bad fuck, it was - ”  
“Enough,” said Tommy and they shut up. Up above there was still the sound of the party going on, music and voices and moving feet. “You’d better carry him Phil, he’s not as scrawny as he looks. We’ll look around, check he’s not got stuff he’d want to bring.”  
Unless he wanted empty bottles and packets there was nothing. Not even a coat or change of clothes. Long experienced in these kinds of digs, Tommy looked over the floor until he saw the notch and lifted the loose board up. The hiding place was empty.  
“Let’s go.”  
The torso of the demon was gone from the stairs. Ethan walked behind again, keeping away from Phil who carried the other man with incredible gentleness, despite his bruised fists. Ethan never could show his interest in anything, it opened him up to ridicule, to hurt. Besides, it just wasn’t his nature. So he couldn’t show his relief that they were taking the sick-splattered body with them, made sure he didn’t get too close as they made their way down. Giles, Ripping-The-Heads-Off-Things-Guy, whatever you wanted to call him, he was the key to the world behind the curtain. More than that, Ethan just felt this fundamental surety about the other man. It was like bumping into someone from a previous life and realising you’d been looking for them.  
It was something he had never felt before, but Ethan listened to feelings. It was either the universe or himself telling him things, and both of those were pretty good options.  
Phil had to turn sideways to cradle his charge through the tiny lobby. Outside the rain started dumping on them again.  
“We should get a car,” said Tommy, “if those suits come back we want to be gone.”  
“I’ll get it, said Randall. He was properly slurring now, the extra bottles he’d downed outside in the street fully kicking in.  
“We’ll get one as we go, better keep moving.”  
It didn’t take them long. A dinky little side street of Mews conversions, pricey and artistic against the backdrop of the cavernous houses they had once served, which were now subdivided, empty or gone. Cars squeezed up against the walls, leaving just enough room for another car to pass. There was a new reg mini but they decided against it, they’d barely be able to get Phil in through the door.  
“This one.”  
One thing you could always count on Randall for was a jimmy for the car lock. Drunk though he was he pulled one out now, a flexible strip from somewhere in his coat back. He wobbled bit as he leant on the door, one eye closed against the blur. The lock clunked.  
“I’ll drive,” said Tommy firmly, “you go in the back.”  
“S’my car,” mumbled Randall but got in the back when Tommy flicked up the locks.  
Dee in the front seat, Phil in the back middle, Giles held carefully on his knee. The lids rolled back, the green eyes opened.  
“Don’t,” said the voice firmly, no trace of stutter. “Don’t want.”  
“It’s alright,” said Phil to him, shifting his position as the head rolled back on him. “He’s coming around, we’d better motor.”  
The engine turned over, Tommy crept it forward down the narrow strip of cobbles, not yet turning on the head lights. Giles’ eyelids opened again, the lights outside each dinky maisonette glinted against them as they flashed slowly overhead.  
“Out.” Again his voice held no hesitations, no stammer, as though the semi-conscious brain and mouth worked better together, stopped getting in each other’s way.  
“Yeah mate, we’re on it, don’t worry.”  
“Want out.”  
Tommy swung into the main road and flicked on the lights. It was a good car, the engine was barely audible under the sound of the rain and the wipers which smudged across the windscreen at a furious pace. Tommy and Phil held some brief discussion about what roads to take. Dee explored the glovebox, adding a lipstick, a discreet package of tampons, a tin of mints and a duster to Tommy’s pockets.  
“I left my bag in that Thing’s room,” she said, suddenly realising.  
“You want it?” asked Tommy.  
“Not really, it was beside the bed when that Thing split open.” She shuddered in the cold of the unheated car, the night pressing hard against the window, turning it into a radiating pane of cold. “It dripped on it. I’ll get another.”  
“I don’t want to do it. Enough.”  
“Hush mate, it’s alright, nobody’s going to make you do anything.”  
Sitting beside Phil, slightly squashed against the door, Ethan wondered if that would prove true. There were things Ethan had to know and the answers were right here in the car beside him. Could he make this man tell him things? Would he make him?  
There was a tray in the dash, just above the lighter. Dee put her hand in it and pulled it back out with a happy sound, a hand rolled cigarette caught between her fingers. She sniffed it to confirm and smiled.  
“This woman travels well. Lighter anyone?”  
Ethan handed her his. Randall was too drunk to find his own pockets and Phil was holding onto Giles who was starting to fidget.  
“It’s ok, calm down.” Phil’s deep voice filled the car.  
Dee shook the lighter and tried the flame.  
“You’ll have to shake it again, it’s nearly out.”  
“It’s alright, calm down, calm down.”  
It was more than a fidget now. Eyes only half open, but conscious perhaps of been held, of the close proximity of a group of strange bodies, Giles began to thrash. Alarmingly, violently. Tommy swerved the car, distracted.  
“What are you doing, hold him down!”  
“It’s alright, calm down, everything’s alright.” Dee was twisted around in the seat, one hand still holding the joint and the lighter, the other reaching out for the flailing limbs. One of his legs kicked down and scraped down Randall’s shin.  
“Ow, fucking ow! shouted Randall and begin to throw blows down onto the semi-conscious head.  
“Stop it, Randall, stop it.” Dee emptied her hands as Phil bodily got hold of the other man and, one arm around the legs, one around the chest and arms, dropped him down forcefully into the foot-well. Randal continued smacking down punches, pulling his feet from underneath and kicking down, knees bent.  
“Still want to bring him home do you? Guy’s a psycho”  
“Stop it Randall, you’re not helping.”  
Dee rolled herself over the back of the chair, landing partly on Phil, partly on the still thrashing form in the footwell. It was making a horrible noise, not words but something like a frustrated sound trying to push its way forcefully out of the mouth.  
“You got it?” asked Tommy, eyes flicking to the mirror.  
“Hush, hush, everything’s alright my darling.” She laid on top of Giles, pushing away Randall’s legs and ending the spate of kicks. Her body pushed her slight weight down onto his, she stroked his hair, put her mouth near the ears, his face pressed downwards into the floor. “Everything is alright, and even if it’s not, we’re here. Be still, darling, be still.”  
Her arms wrapped around him, best as she could. He quietened and she crooned to him like that until the car cut through a warren of little streets. He was asleep and still and silent by the time Tommy cut of the engine and pulled the duster from his jacket pocket to wipe his prints from the wheel.

They were a few streets from the house. It was a bad sort of car thief who borrowed a pair of wheels then casually parked them outside his own place. Doors left open, wires already out, there was a slim chance it would still be there in the morning. Despite everything that had happened, the night had still not flipped over onto midnight and they weren’t the only ones out and about.  
Dee checked the boot. There was a spare winter coat in there, white, hessian-looking wool with silver threads. Thick, stylish and warm, she pulled it out, handing Tommy his jacket back.  
“Mine,” she said, pleased at the discovery.  
The squat had stopped been a house some time ago. A derelict that would be easier to demolish than to refurb. It had never been a great place to begin with. Cheaply built, pre-war slum, with walls one brick thick and one cold water tap to the kitchen, long ago cut off. No bathroom, not that they noticed that particularly. Post-war babies that they were, every one of them but Ethan had grown up with an outside toilet, not shared with other families if you were lucky, and a tub in the kitchen for a bath. Like at the flat earlier, the front door was permanently open. They pushed past it, dripping rain, and headed for the stairs. It was utterly dark, no electric in the place, no lights of any kind on the staircase. They collectively occupied the upstairs floor and knew the stairs well. They went up without needing a light.  
The door at the foot of the stairs was open, revealing the glow of firelight, strongly orange in the blackness.  
“Good evening Miss Page, did you have a good night?”  
“Not really Mr Dodgekins no. Is that your fire lit, do you mind if we use it, I really need to boil the kettle and make some drinks?”  
She couldn’t see Mr Dodgekins but her mind supplied the picture of him anyway, laying it over the vague shadow in the dark. If you didn’t think about it too carefully, he looked out of place here. Old, in his eighties at least, always in a jacket and tie, always polite, greeting her every time she entered or exited like a doorman at the Savoy. If you did think about it properly though, he fitted in here, same as everyone else. A man with nowhere else to go, or somewhere that he didn’t choose to go to. Jacket and tie always on, so smelling of sweat and dirt from sleeping in them. His room was full of rubbish. He collected literal trash, piling the place high with papers and discarded crap, Randall even saw him take a dog carcass in there yesterday, rigor mortis still stiffening the joints. In the three months Dee had lived here, other squatters had broken in and trashed his room twice, knocking over the carefully stacked piles, breaking anything they could. The boys had fitted a padlock on the door for him and he’d been so pleased with it, grateful. They were the only ones he spoke to in the house, he called them his Young Friends.  
“You won’t touch anything.” He didn’t like anyone in amongst his stuff but for them he made an exception. The tone of his words gave consent.  
“I’ll just get the kettle. You are so lovely, thank you.”  
They had padlocked all three of their rooms too once the last of the other first floor squatters - a greasy guy and his girlfriend who’d made a habit of crapping on the stairs until Phil had rubbed their noses in it like dogs and they’d got the message and pissed off – had gone. Dee had been delighted at the departure of the only other girl in the place, who she had loathed. It left them with a small box room, claimed by Dee, what had been the front bedroom, shared by the boys, and the back room claimed from the couple, that was a sort of ‘everything else’ room. Tommy undid the padlock on it and pushed open the battered door, reaching for the lamp as he did so. His lighter sparked a flame and the lamp glowed.  
“Put him down over there,” said Tommy, gesturing towards the fire place.  
The room was empty except for a mismatching collection of chairs, a coffee table, Dee’s ever growing collection of clothes and things that pleased her, and the sealable box they kept the supplies in.  
“If he kicks off again we might have a problem, he’s fucking strong, even in that state.”  
Tommy lit the other lamps and passed one to Dee.  
“Tie him to the fire grate, it’s not like we can light it again tonight.”  
Dee and Ethan had used the small pile of fuel they had to boil their water. Dee could feel the grime on her face as she thought of washing but it would have to wait. There was a small amount of water left in the bottle and she tipped it into the empty kettle.  
“Don’t hurt him will you, I think he’s really sad about something.”  
“He’s hurting himself Dee.” Phil stood up, leaving the prone figure below him on the floor. “Go on, go make him a cup of tea.”  
She swerved around a something in the doorway, avoiding spilling from the kettle.  
“Ethan! You blend in to well, we’re going to lose you in a shadow one day.”  
“Are you planning on returning my lighter?”  
“Living room, Tommy’s coat.”  
Down the stairs Mr Dodgekins’ door was still open. She called in beyond the first tower of clutter.  
“It’s me.”  
“Come in.”  
Taking a deep breath she tucked in her arms and squeezed through. It stank. The whole squat did, urine soaked into floorboards and rot from food and the house itself that was wasting away. Their area upstairs, however, was sort of clean. This room was something else. As she followed the path through to the fire, rats scuttled in the layers of newspaper by her head.  
Mr Dodgekins took the kettle from her and set in on the fire. He gestured, this time to the only piece of furniture poking through. An armchair, that he must sleep and eat and do everything in.  
“Thank you,” said Dee and made sure that she sat on the barely-there fabric of her dress. She was the polar opposite of a prude but she had no desire to spend the rest of the night picking lice out of her pubic hair. Her knickers will still in the bed at the flat and she knew for a fact that the chair was crawling with life.  
She could hear the boys moving around upstairs. She wanted their new acquisition to stay. It was partly selfish, she could see the moment that Thing’s skin had ripped open, how it had clicked its teeth together, making to grab her. She had never felt sick with fear before. The fear was slightly less when she remembered the sound of the head rolling down the stairs.  
It was also partly generous. The boy looked tormented and exhausted. He had wanted to die. Dee was happy to live around the edges of life, to treat life as something to be experimented and gambled with but she never wanted an empty room and numbness. That was what that room in the flats’ had felt like; emptiness and numbness and frustrated despair.  
The kettle whistled into her thoughts. Mr Dodgekins lifted it off the fire for her, wrapping the cloth around the handle.  
“Thank you. Night night Mr Dodgekins.”  
“Good night Miss Paige.”  
The hallway smelt almost pleasant in comparison. She made her way back up, the steam from the kettle heating her face as she went, dislodging some of the clumped mascara from the corner of her eye.

They had stripped him naked. The lamp light showed a body of muscle and skin, marked all over with bruises almost faded to yellow, giving him a sick colour. Bones poked up too keenly through the skin, it had curled around itself, partly hunched and cowed even in its semi-conscious state. Ethan sat in his chair and watched out of the corner of his eyes.  
“What’s that muscle there?” asked Phil, gesturing with the light.  
“I don’t know,” replied Tommy, prodding the same place on his own body. “I don’t think I have it, shit, do you think that lead will hold? I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to pull the fucking grate out.”  
They had used the dog lead usually found wrapped around Randall’s bag to chain it shut. Randall had stopped complaining for the first time all evening about that, he was more than happy for them to tie the guy up. The leather of the strap went over one of the wrists, then the chain wrapped around them both, over the small hearth and into the bars of the cast iron grating. Tommy knew from his own childhood experiences that it was an impossible position to get out of, but there was a difference between an eight year old kid and the man in-front of him now.  
“We should tie his legs up too, stop him hurting himself.” Phil started to undo the belt around his waist. “Use this.”  
“Don’t hurt him.” Dee appeared in the shadow of the doorway holding the kettle. From where she was the two men stood in the grainy light of the lamp like the illuminated figures in an renaissance painting.  
“We won’t,” said Tommy and pulled the belt tight around Giles’ ankles. After thinking about it for a second, he unknotted the belt, pulled it higher up above the knees and strapped together the thighs. He then undid his own, much smaller, belt and did the ankles with it.  
Dee added a tea bag to a mug, cocoa to another. No milk but there was some powdered stuff. She spooned some in, added the water.  
“Why is he deliciously naked? Would he want to be?”  
“He’s deliciously naked cos he’s pissed and crapped and thrown up all over himself.”  
And because those bits of purple flesh and oddly pale blood stank, added Tommy to himself. They’d stripped him and thrown the clothes out the window into the yard. The yard was a six foot by three foot excuse to hold the original Privy which was now blocked beyond any possibility of using. It was back to back with other, broken-flagged, junk filled six by three foot yards and Privy’s and when Dee wasn’t there and they couldn’t be bothered with stairs, all four of them pissed directly out the window into it. Still, Tommy would be willing to bet that those clothes were the worst smelling things down there.  
Phil went to get a blanket, picking up the sleeping Randall by the collar as he passed. Randall didn’t even wake, heavy in an alcoholic sleep punctuated by snores.  
“Here, which do you want first, the tea or the cocoa?”  
“Cocoa and that packet of biscuits. Any sugar in it?”  
Dee scooted a few paces nearer on her knees and moved her fingers to the outside rim of the cup, turning the handle to Tommy.  
“Yes, six. That’s all the water though.”  
No water in the house, they usually took bottles with them when they went out in the daytime and scrounged.  
“This should be enough.”  
Ethan watched as Tommy dunked the biscuits into the cocoa, feeding the soft mush into the mouth, Deidre helping by holding the mouth open or closed, apologising, wiping away the drips. The eyes blurred open, looking more into this world but confused.  
“Eat,” commanded Dee and the body obeyed her, so hungry it hurt. They couldn’t get him to drink the tea though, he twisted his head away from their hands, he’d had enough of them. Phil swapped in for Dee but with the same quickness that had grabbed Ethan’s attention earlier, and that grabbed it again now, the dog lead whipped across the hearth and the muscles twisted and heaved as they bulked against the restraints.  
“Alright, alright, enough,” agreed Tommy backing hurriedly away. “Let’s all get some sleep.”  
Ethan watched them as Dee easily won her argument to stay in the room and keep an eye on their guest. Phil dragged in her mattress and said he would stay too, just in case.  
“He’s not going to hurt me.”  
She pulled off the soiled dress and threw it in a corner, her nakedness nothing new to any of them but never under-appreciated for all that.  
“Night,” said Tommy sounding suddenly tired. Phil replied as he zipped up his jacket and rolled against Dee’s mattress.  
“Night mate.”  
“Night night.”  
“Night,” said Ethan as he rose silently from his chair. There was a start and an intake of breath.  
“Shit, Ethan, but sometimes I forget you’re there,” said Tommy.  
“I know.” Ethan passed him and headed for the door. He was very fucking aware of it, the boy at the edges, the boy at the back. “I know.”  
Tommy followed him to the shared room, bringing one of the lamps. After an hour or so of utter failure to sleep, Ethan slipped back out to the landing. The lantern in the other room was starting to burn low. In the light of it, he could see how Dee had abandoned her mattress to sleep on top of Phil’s chest, her body moving up and down slightly with the deep breaths of his sleep. In the corner by the fire, Ethan could just make out the glint of the dog lead, a pair of hands curled tight. Under the rumble of Phil’s snore he could hear the naked body whimper and he understood then why that word was always followed by ‘like an animal in pain.’ Unlike the demon, whose screams had sounded human, these noises were animal and feral and beyond the comfort of words.  
Drink yourself stupid for five weeks, overdose and of course you’ll know pain, said Ethan’s thoughts. It was a harsh comment but it didn’t worry him. However, despite his determined lack of attraction to the man, despite his fear that the information he craved would be held from him, despite his so far infallible ability to maintain only disinterest or sardonic approval, Ethan was fighting the urge to go in and hold the man until the noises stopped.  
Like running into someone from a previous life and realising you’d been looking for them. Earlier that thought hadn’t worried him.  
It worried him now.


	2. Two

Ethan gave up on sleeping at about six o’clock. He wasn’t a morning person, if he saw six o’clock it was because he’d come through the night to meet it. Tossing all night in a freezing room and a head of tangled thoughts hardly qualified as a quality night. He was sober, had drunk enough last night to have a raging thirst and foul mouth though not enough for a headache and he realised that his hand was still coated with a film of sick. He reached on top of the blanket and pulled on his coat.  
The room was just about big enough to hold them. Phil could never find a mattress to fit his 6ft6 length so he slept on a massive pile of blankets like a slumbering bear. Tommy’s double mattress was against the inside landing wall, Ethan’s single one opposite it, against the connector wall to next door. Phil was usually between them and Randall was on his camp bed against the back room wall. Phil and Randall were the original occupiers, though Phil had vaguely known Tommy when they were younger and suggested he move in when his place fell through. Ethan always thought that must have been a relief to Phil. No one could possibly want to spend that much time with Randall, though the other two seemed to quite like him when he wasn’t whinging. Ethan didn’t.  
They all kept a few personal things stored safe in the room. Ethan’s was in a shoe box inside a small tubular canvass bag. He’d found Randall going through it, about a fortnight after he’d moved in. Randall had laughed at him:   
“You know this is pagan crap right.”  
“I'm surprised you know what pagan means.”  
New in the house, new in the group, Ethan had stood there, trying to hide his uncertainty.   
“You really buy into this rubbish?”  
“Give the book back, please, I get your point, I’m crushed by your opinion, I’m at the mercy of your truly excellent argument. Now give it back.”  
“Or what?”  
Phil had filled the door at that point, ducking under the frame.  
“Or I make you give it back. What you going through his stuff for?”  
Ethan had felt more settled after that, it was the start of Phil and Tommy feeling like his friends and not friends of Dee’s, an odd sensation that had grown on him over the last two or so months. He’d never really cultivated friends before, so far on the edges of other groups that he could barely even tag along. Still, he would have disliked Randall even without the prying. His own retaliation of going through Randall’s stuff and taking the second to last page out of each chapter of the awfully serious looking political texts he’d found there had been petty but satisfying. He still had no idea if Randall knew. Randall certainly didn’t let on to the others that he even owned the books, any books, or that one of them really belonged to a prestigious university library, the ticket-fly still on the inside page.  
In the darkness of the room, Ethan slipped his own book into his coat pocket and tiptoed carefully out.  
The squat was one of four derelicts that ran side by side in the street-long row of terrace housing. One of them was scorched by fire, the other two lacking such details as window glass, roof sections and even parts of external walls. Theirs was the only one of the four that was habitable, though there was often drop-in squatters in the best of the other three. The rest of the street wasn’t much better than the derelicts. On the edge of the zones cleared away in the post war building phases, the houses were too rubbish for landlords to invest in up-keeping. They were occupied by the constantly working who would never earn enough to stop working or to live somewhere else and those who just didn’t care.  
Ethan didn’t own a watch but he could guess the time by the darkness of the sky and the trickle of workers making their way out. It was February and the world was dreary. He shut the front door, slipped into the empty, half-roofed shell of the house next door that they and the rest of the squatters used as the toilet and held his breath as he went. It stank in there and unless you had a light it was best not to step beyond the door frame.  
Putting his hands into his pockets he slipped on down the street, his pace completely at odds with the that of the workers, who either shuffled or sped, weary or late. Ethan, even when out for a purpose, gave off the impression that he was sauntering. Weight slightly on his toes, a little bit flighty. He over took a slow mover and covered the three streets over to the shop apparently fascinated with the sky, his own boots, the backside of a passing man (front side no good) and his own thoughts.  
The shop was at the end of another street of partially blocked up houses. It had survived this long but a new supermarket on the main road was likely to be its death. Hardly an excellent area for the supermarket to be investing in either but they had made the brilliant deduction that the residents who were left would probably prefer to do all their shopping out of the rain, in one place, in a store that actually had what they wanted. Once the houses were finally cleared, whatever came next, even if it was offices, such a superstore would survive.  
Ethan disliked supermarkets. They were bright and brilliantly lit and clean and designed to make you go one way, despite your own ideas. They were an anathema to his very personality and he avoided the new one at all costs, even if the others enjoyed it for the easy steal-ability of its produce.   
He could see the point though, about them actually having stock.   
The shop on the corner looked like it had already given up, if you didn’t know it was open you’d think it out of business. Brown paper covered the windows, the white-washed special offer prices had been scratched off and never replaced leaving marks. Ethan stood aside in the doorway, letting an old woman come out. She rammed past him without comment, pushing her trolley-bag.  
“You’re extremely welcome,” said Ethan.  
The woman stopped pushing and spat on the floor by his feet.  
“Fag boy,” she said and moved on.  
He looked at himself in the paper-backed glass of the shop door. He felt no shame that people could tell by looking at him, mainly because he felt no shame about it at all, but sometimes he wondered how they could tell. He was wearing nothing outrageous, just black jeans, last night’s shirt which was red, a jumper to fight off the cold of the squat which was now totally invisible under the coat which was also black, worn to grey at collars and cuffs. He’d prefer more colour but hadn’t a lot of choice about it at the moment. Hair long and naturally curled, loosely tied back, not even any make up, he’d spent too long bickering with Dee over the kettle. Boots a little bit high healed, was that all it took?  
“On the plus side you will soon be dead,” he said to the woman, though didn’t bother to chase her down to where she would hear him. He had better uses for his time, like stopping been so diabolically thirsty. He pushed open the door and inhaled the smell of shoe polish and suspicious meat, brush bristles and tobacco smoke. The wooden shelves that ran around the two walls behind the counter were already permanently empty except for cigarettes and booze. Any other produce in stock was now on a trestle table against the other wall, unordered, un-priced, a cheap-item rummage sale.  
“Morning Frank, what have you got today?”  
A small man leaned on the counter, smoking, his fingers stained as brown with nicotine as his shop overalls. He didn’t look up from his paper, an item which he coincidently no longer stocked.  
“How should I know, why don’t you look and find out?”  
Ethan grinned, happy that you wouldn’t get such amazingly bad service in a supermarket. It had been a few days since his last visit. The table held a few old favourites that never seemed to shift – a set of doily-edged, old fashioned looking mop caps and aprons, last worn by service staff before the war, possibly the Napoleonic one. A case of something labelled as Strawberry Bitter, an experiment in brewing that not even Randall would drink. Four pairs of raffia sandals with the straps already broken and detached at the soul. There was also repeat items and new items, like plastic clothes pegs, dish cloths, soda washing crystals, floor soap and tins labelled only as ‘White Fish.’ Ethan rummaged through, happily distracted from his own thoughts.  
“Well, do you want anything or not?” demanded Frank from behind the counter.  
“Yes, I’ll have my cigarettes.”  
Not his favourite or even second favourite brand but Frank hadn’t changed his suppliers in decades and wouldn’t now, not to get in fancy flavoured foreign stuff for a load of dirty squatters.  
Ethan took the opportunity to slip two packets of stockings into his pocket for Deidre and pulled out the book. It was really only half a book. The back had been burnt by fire so that from about halfway through the pages went from whole, to the top half, the top third then just a few scraps in the stitching. Ethan had thought about a certain page of it all night but only the shop was relatively light enough to read the old, densely packed type face. The title page said “Spells of the Common Saxon Witch and Other Late English Incantations. A Book from the Council of Watchers Print Press, 1st collation and copy from records 1625, First Impression 1701, this edition 1826.” He flicked gently through the fire-distressed pages. Each spell, or incantation, had an introduction in relatively modern English. After that though the spell itself, and the instructions, were utterly indecipherable. Only a few words and letter gatherings amongst it all told him that it was, at heart, his own language. He could read the ingredients list however, which was included in the introduction.  
“You want these or not, I'm not a reading library.”  
“Yes, I want them,” Ethan glided over to the counter, not looking up from the book. “I don’t suppose you have Flower of Thannery, Wiley-Way, Sessions Knot or Verbannion do you, as I’m here?”  
“I don’t know,” said Frank, a glimmer of the shop keeper he once was showing through. “What are they?”  
“Herbs, I think, possibly flowers, they make you sleep.”  
Frank turned away from the counter and turned back, plonking something down which had inexplicably appeared in his hands. A bottle, slightly greeny-blue and old looking, probably predating not only suggested sell-by-dates but also the typed label.  
“There you go.”  
“What’s that?”  
“It says ‘Sleeping Draft.’ Made from herbs. It’s what I’ve got, take it or leave it”  
The bottle was rather wonderful, dimpled and rippled and rectangular-shaped like a huge sucked lozenge.  
“I’ll take it,” said Ethan.  
“Good, had it for years, I think it came with the shop, don’t blame me if it kills you.”  
“Excellent warning, you should hand them out with the cigarettes too.” He picked up a loaf from the tray on the counter. “I’ll take the bread as well.”  
“You know you have to order that, put it back.”  
Ethan hurriedly licked his dry tongue over the crust.  
“How about now?” Frank gave him a look then started banging the prices into the till. “Excellent, do you have any jam?”  
“No.”  
“Marmalade?”  
“No.”  
“Anything for bread?”  
“Tinned white fish.”  
“Pass, but I’ll take the two large bottles of lemonade near the door.”  
Ethan was of the opinion Frank made the prices up as he went along. He re-pocketed the book, put the cigarettes and blue glass bottle into his other pocket, picked up the bread and heaped some coins down on the counter. He was propping the door open with his heel, picking up the lemonade when Frank said,  
“This is a penny short.”  
“It’s what I’ve got, take it or leave it.”  
The door swung shut behind him and Ethan smiled, amused. He balanced his shopping in his arms and sauntered home, driven slightly mad by the closeness of the bottle tops, the fullness of his arms and the deepness of his thirst.

Nothing happened all day. The sleeping body shackled to their fire grate did just that – sleep. Sometimes half-waking up, darting confused eyes around the room like a trapped animal. Sometimes whimpering and groaning in his sleep, the blanket showing wet patches from urine and sweat. During those brief periods of half-waking he was soothed by Deirdre and fed bread dipped in cocoa, Randall having gone out for water and stomach tablets. Awake, and back in the world enough to follow her instructions; open your mouth, swallow, drink, go back to sleep my darling. Sleepy, and too out of the world to focus his eyes, to care too much about anything as his body protested weeks of non-stop alcohol, tablets and lack of food with a payback of pain. Pieces of the conversations happening around him sunk into his brain, confusing him before been discarded:  
“I think those kung-fu dudes did some damage man, can’t stop farting.”  
“Yeah Rand, we noticed.”  
“Nothing to do with drinking milk and lager mixes all last night then?”  
“Urgh, you didn’t? Darling, why did you do that?  
“Tommy dared me.”  
“No, I didn’t, I said even you wouldn’t drink that.”  
“That’s a dare. Shit, I think I might be dying.”  
“We might be dying, go outside man will you?”  
And then.  
“Do you think those suits really could track him down here?”  
“Don’t know Bird. They seem to really want him for something.”  
“Yes, but how will they know he’s here?”  
Sometimes it was nothing more than odd words drifting in and out. Sometimes sounds like the crackle of a fire and water pouring. That one seemed to be on repeat and the conversation came in again:  
“It’s not coming off. What am I going to do, I don’t want to be purple?”  
“You’re not purple Dee, just purple splattered. Mottled in-fact.”  
“That doesn’t make me feel better Ethie. It’s monster gunk.”  
“Purple is an excellent colour. Imperial.”  
“Yes darling, but everyone is socialist these days.”  
A pause, then,  
“Seriously, I can’t get this off. I’m going to have to go to Mrs Atkinsons.”  
“Whose Mrs Atkinson?  
“She lets me use her loo, you don’t honestly think I’ve been going where all you boys go do you? She might let me have a bath.”  
“Will she let me have a bath?”  
“She has a rampaging sexual appetite Tommy darling, she’ll eat you alive.”  
“I could enjoy that.”  
A solid sort of splash as a cloth was dropped into water.  
“Actually she lets me use the loo if I change her sheets and run her stuff to the laundry, she’s really old. I think she’d freak if she had a man in her house.”  
He lost the thread of the words then and the deeper sleep came back, almost dreamless but starting to be infiltrated by pictures from the outside world. He dreamed about a dark haired man sitting in a chair with a black book that was on fire and of a bird flitting happily around a room, landing on perches and of a rat running over his body, tiny feet pressing into is skin.  
“Tommy? Rat! Better kill it before Dee’s back or she’ll freak.”  
“OK, I’ll catch it, you go get the brick.”  
“At least she hasn’t named this one. Shit but it freaked me out too, squishing something called Arnold.”  
“Yeah man, you were in her bad books. Where is it?”  
“Over there.”  
But mostly the sleep came back around to the usual dream, the one he’d had for as long as he could remember dreaming. The blond haired girl, almost a skeleton with the half-flesh and dull eyes of the semi decomposed. Black dress, though sometimes that changed. Sometimes she spoke to him, the exposed sinews of her mouth creaking and he never could describe her voice, her accent but he could still hear the words. She told him about needing him, she told him that he was hers. She called him Watcher-mine. Affectionate, sometimes stern, holding him to secrecy when he was younger, to keeping going when he was older and the training started. When that happened, when he was ten, she had even warned him of it.  
“Happy Birthday Watcher-mine. I think it’s going to start here. You stay with me, OK?”  
She was usually by the stream in the fields by the house, always in morning sunshine, sometimes they did nothing but sit amongst the green trees, sometimes there was a desert but the stream still ran through. They were only ever brief dreams, never long, never complex, no conversations beyond her brief sentences. He never spoke, he never tried to, he was happy to see her, he liked been hers. But it was frightening too, terrifying. No matter how bright the sun, no matter what she said to him, the dream was a nightmare.  
The last five weeks he’d nearly drunk enough to push the dream out, but it was never quite enough. She was still there, sitting by the stream, drinking from a tea cup, laying out a picnic blanket with cheese, always cheese, practising moves:  
“See Watcher-mine, it’s all about the training.”  
She was still with him now, though the stream was running darker and the shadows from the trees had changed. For the first time, the dream had moved on.  
“I think it’s afternoon,” she said, turning to look up at the trees.  
A rat ran across her feet and he chased it, the stream and the meadow and the sun ran out and the rat ran through darkness, over floor boards. It ran over him, he was down on the floor and it was on his face. He didn’t think he was dreaming now.  
“Grab it, it’s on his face.”  
“Got it. Hold its tail.”  
There was a thunk.   
“Window.”  
His stomach rumbled, his guts knotted, he wanted nothing but sleep. He was aware his eyes were open, that the room was dim, that his head wanted him to close his eyes, to vanish. He had no idea where he was. He closed his eyes and dreamed garbled images of an Emperor scrubbing a purple cloak, complaining about the stains.

“Anyone want this?”  
The stomach tablets had done no good, Randall still felt like his guts were full of golf balls and gas, hitting together and exploding. He actually was seriously worried that the kick he’d taken had done damage but the others weren’t bothered. If it was Thomas or Phil who was ill they would be, if it was Deirdre they’d be running around trying to make her feel better. He kept hold of his stomach and groaned occasionally to let them know but they just told him to go outside. They were more bothered about the guy chained up to the fire, giving him the rest of the bread, spooning coco and biscuits down him. Dee was to blame about that, not only had she found the weirdest guy at the party to fuck, she’d then run screaming. Honestly, Randall was convinced she wasn’t stable in the head.   
It was her fault as well that they’d ended up with the digs been so crowded. It was her who’d brought Ethan along and it wasn’t even her place to do that. She’d only been there a month, a one night stand for one of the downstairs squatters. She’d come nosing upstairs and never left. He’d complained to Tommy when she’d brought Ethan, he’d said to him:  
“It’s not even her digs man.”  
And Tommy had just said.  
“It’s a squat, it’s no one’s digs man.”  
“Yeah, but he’s bent, you can tell.”  
Tommy had thought about it for moment or two, obviously he hadn’t been able to tell at all. Then he shrugged.  
“So? I’m sure he won’t jump you in the night. But I tell you what, if he does, and you don’t enjoy it, just yell and me and Phil will go and get Dee to come rescue you.”  
Ethan didn’t jump him, in-fact he seemed completely disinterested in any kind of physical touch but Randall found he was right about the other thing. That Tommy and Phil would be much more interested in Ethan as a friend than in Randall as one. It always happened. Now, if he wasn’t careful, their attention would be split even more, and they’d be trouble with the suits. They also didn’t need another posh boy, he really hated posh boys and they already had Ethan who was posh enough. No, this new guy, Rupert or whatever posh boy name he had, had to go, as soon as he woke up properly.  
Randall’s guts rumbled again and he pushed the plate further away. The new supermarket place did whole cooked chickens and it solved the problem of not having a cooker. He quite liked them but if he ate too much the others wouldn’t get the message he was sick.  
“I’ll have it,” said Phil, sliding the plate over the coffee table with his fork. Randall wasn’t surprised, feeding Phil was like feeding a mountain. Dee had already given him half of her plate, more interested in picking at the random, uncooked veg she’d sliced up and that no one but her and Ethan ever ate. Phil ate it too of course, but only because he’d still be hungry, not out of any liking for it.  
The supermarket had a wine section, which was way trendy, especially for an area like this. Randall had never drunk wine before but he’d pretended he had, hoping that it would impress the others. Turns out Tommy and Phil hadn’t ever had it either and Randall wished now that he’d said the same because Ethan knows all about wine, of course he does, and now Ethan was giving the others wine classes. The sarcastic bastard knew that Randall was lying as well, even if he didn’t say anything. It was the way he looked at Randall and smirked.  
Ethan leaned forward from his chair and dropped his empty plate into the washing bowl. That was the other thing about Deidre, now she lived with them, they had to have plates, which meant washing up, in a place with no water. There were tin camping plates but why live in a squat if you want to bother with stuff like that? They had wine glasses as well. Ethan picked his up off the table and sat back, the white wine in the glass looking bright in the lamps.  
“I’m surprised Dee doesn’t want to feed it to her patient. He’s been awake for five minutes, checking us out.”  
“Ethan! Why didn’t you say if you’d noticed?”  
There was a scramble as they got to their feet, everyone but Phil putting their plate down.  
“Well we are extremely interesting people,” answered Ethan as he stepped his long legs over the little table, “so I understand why he’d want to watch.”  
Randall made sure he got there first. It was quite a small room so this meant ducking in front of Deidre. If he let her get there first she’d have the new guy tucked up in the front bedroom before anyone else got a say in it.  
“Stay back,” he said to her.  
“Don’t be silly Randall, I've been looking after him all day.”  
“Yeah, and now he’s awake, you want him going nuts on you, like in the car?”  
“Yes, but he wasn’t awake then, was he?”  
She stayed back though when Tommy put his arm out, the five of them making a badly drawn semi-circle just out of the reach of the legs.  
Last time Dee had dosed the man with coco she’d left him half sitting up, legs drawn up, leaning sideways onto the side of the fireplace. His head was still slightly to one side, resting on the iron work and he hadn’t moved anything apart from his eyes which were open, focused and, unlike before, taking in the world around him. Ethan was right, he was watching and Randall found it more than a little freaky that he’d been doing that.  
“Hello,” said Dee with a smile. “Are you feeling better now?”  
The eyes shifted towards her. The face showed only tiredness, and caution.  
“I’m Tommy, this is Phil - ”  
Phil waved with his fork as Tommy said his name,  
“- and Dee and Ethan, Randall. You OD’d so we brought you here. We got rid of the suits.”  
Randall noticed the order of the introductions. Giles’ eyes shifted to Tommy as he spoke, followed the line of names, went back to settled on Ethan, staring at him. Ethan didn’t do anything about it, just stared back but it was freaking Randall out. He reached out his hand and clicked it as near to those green eyes as he dared. Nothing, the eyes responded to the click then shot back to Ethan.  
“I think he’s retarded,” said Randall. Deirdre’s eyes flashed at him.  
“Randall, honestly, why would you say that?”  
“Because I think he’s retarded. The guy’s not all there Dee.”   
“He could have done himself some brain damage, all those pills,” Phil was still holding the fork and he gestured with it as he spoke, resting the other arm with the plate on Tommy’s shoulders.  
“Even if he is retarded he’s very pretty and we’ve brought him home now.”  
“You’ve brought him home now,” corrected Randall  
“You understand, what we’re saying?” asked Tommy.  
The eyes didn’t bother moving that time, remaining on Ethan. What was so interesting about him, was it just some posh-boy thing? Randall was getting annoyed, he put out his arm to click his fingers again. Giles’ own hand snapped around it before Randall’s fingers even joined. The hands were awkwardly wrapped in the dog lead but still he managed to do it. The fingers were weak but Randall felt them, pressing like points. He tried to pull his hand away but couldn’t.  
“He’s not retarded, he’s checking us out, like I said. Quite a wise move really, when you wake up in a room of strangers. Especially if you’re naked, and tied up. Don’t you think?”  
Randall’s check’s flamed and he yanked his arm back, savagely, pulling it free. The other man’s arm dropped back down and the eyes went back to Ethan.  
“Yes, hello,” said Ethan and carried on looking back.   
“That was stupid,” said Phil to Randall, chucking his empty plate towards the washing bowl and following it with the fork. Tommy moved, cautiously, like he didn’t want to startle anybody, until he put himself back in Giles’ sight-line.  
“I get that you probably feel like shit,” he said, as the eyes stayed unmoving apart from blinks, “but that’s what happens. You want to say here then you can, -”   
Randall’s heart sank at that,  
“ - you saved Dee last night from that demon, we saved you, way I see it, everything’s even.”  
Randall frowned, confused by Tommy talking about demons. It was some bloke that had scared Deidre and got pushed down the stairs by the posh boy. Hardly demonic. The eyes finally shifted from Ethan. Something came over the face, a hardness of some kind and the mouth begin to move like it was trying to say something, the lips moving into position and straining.  
“Great, now he’s stammering again.”  
The mouth stopped moving.  
“Shut up Randall.” Tommy swiftly turned his head to the other boy. Randall saw the expression and looked away, pressing his lips close. He’d forgotten about his stomach for a while but now it twitched again.  
“Sorry,” said Tommy, turning back. “Say something if you want, we won’t interrupt.”  
“Yeah man, stammer away, we don’t mind.” Phil shot Randall a glance as well, just to be certain he’d got the message.  
Giles did nothing for a second or so, then the mouth moved again, the shape forming and sticking before finally the sounds came out. His voice was sore, unsurprising after having Ethan’s fingers shoved repeatedly down his throat.  
“D’d’d’Didn’t s-ss,” he couldn’t do the ‘s’, gave up, dropping that sentence for another. “It w’w’w’was in th’the (ww’)way.”   
Randall’s heart lifted again. That should do it, all that fussing over the guy and he hadn’t even done what they thought.  
“Yeah, we know,” said Phil, cutting into Randall’s hope, “but that don’t matter, you still saved her. Turns out demons are real, that’s a major mind bend, we wouldn’t have known what to do.”  
“Are there more of them, demons and things?”  
Randall interrupted before Tommy could get an answer.  
“Why are you talking about demons? We all tripping here or something?”  
“Because it was a demon on the stair! I don’t get why you don’t remember, it zipped it’s skin off, right in front of me. It smelt, Randall.”  
Randall felt his brain scramble, he could see the staircase, the man falling, no, wait, it was just a head, and there was blood -. His face scrunched up so deeply the frown went into his brain. Deidre crouched down so she was level with Giles.  
“They are real, and you know all about them. I don’t understand why Randall’s confused but maybe you could explain it to us, or not. You don’t have to, you can stay, just like Tommy said. I’m sure those suits won’t find you here, whatever they said.”  
Giles rolled his head to better see her and studied her face.  
“Y’y’yes, t’they (wwww)w’ill.”   
His mouth pressed into a smile behind raggy beard growth. It was the worst smile Dee had ever seen, joyless and resigned and grim.   
“Look dude, even if they do, will take them a few days, right? No one knows where our digs are, you can sort yourself out and if you need a hand when they come, me and Tommy’ll help you out. We stuck it to the Man pretty good last night.”  
“Yeah we did,” Tommy smiled but Giles shook his head, slow and tired. There was no fear in the movement, or worry, it was acceptance of a fact.  
“The’the’they’ll (cc)’come t’-night.” The eyes closed again, head turning back away in resignation. “R’r’r really pPissed t’them (o)off, yyou sssee?”  
The clashing memories in Randall’s brain were making his head ache. He didn’t need this, he could feel the certainties in his mind wobbling and fraying. But he heard those last few stammered sentences and his recently crushed hope bubbled again. Let them come tonight and take the guy away.   
That’ll solve all their problems.

Ethan listened to the back and forth of the others as the green eyes starred at him. It felt like they were looking deeper than his skin, like when someone is trying to recognise you and keeps looking, really, really hard through all the layers of you to find the connection. They were strangers though, Ethan knew that, but it was odd that they both seemed to feel otherwise.  
Dee crouched down to talk and Ethan felt the eyes move off him. It gave him a chance to put his racing thoughts together. His mind was always leaping around, moving fast from thought to thought, whatever languid movement his body was doing on the outside to compensate. Here he was, though, right by that curtain and the man wasn’t going to tell him anything. The man didn’t care. He hadn’t swallowed weeks of pills and alcohol to call for help, he’d done it to wipe his brain out, he’d done it until he OD’d and he didn’t care. How could anyone know the things this man knew, how could they know about all the things that were hidden from Ethan and not care, not have joy in those things, get life from them? Whoever those suits were last night, whoever that ‘Council’ was, Ethan felt sure that they had done this. For the first time ever, Ethan felt anger for someone who wasn’t himself.  
“The’the’they’ll (cc)’come t’-night. R’r’r really pPissed t’them (o)off, yyou sssee?”  
The smile was resigned but almost blissfully so. He wants them to come, thought Ethan, he wants them to because it may bring pain and punishment and an end. He doesn’t care that we saved him, undo him from that fire grate and he’ll just do it again. And there’s nothing I can do about it.  
It was the most unselfish thought he’d ever had in his life. It shocked him, the worry and need that came with it. He followed the conversation of the others, his mind still flashing around, refusing, unable, to land on a solution.  
“If they’re coming for him tonight, we’d better do something.”  
“Like what, barricade the door? If they’re coming for him tonight, let them. Not our problem.”  
“Randall how many times do I have to tell you that it is.”  
“He doesn’t care.” Ethan realised as he said it that they thought he meant Randall. It was true, Randall didn’t care but Ethan had next to no cares in turn about that. “No, not you Randall. Him.” Ethan took a few steps forward –  
“Careful mate,” said Phil.  
\- and another until he stood directly in-front of the naked man, only the twisted up blanket and a few inches of air between them.   
“Would you open your eyes and look at me? I’m not very good at saying please when I actually mean it, but I think you should. Open your eyes, I mean. I’m indifferent on if you say please or not.”  
There was a second of Ethan waiting then the heavy eyes dragged open. Ethan was locked in that gaze again. He had no idea what he was going to say, that was the thing about his mind, it was often so quick that the person it raced away from was himself. He felt it run down to a few thoughts, certain and steady: I’ve got to stop him killing himself as soon as we untie him; for some reason I care about him, I fundamentally care; I’ve got to get him to tell me what he knows; I’ve got to stay on the right side of the curtain. The thoughts stacked on top of each other like blocks, all sounding at once. His hand reached down and pulled the book from his pocket. He notice how the gaze flicked to it at once before coming back again.  
“I got this at school. They were chucking out a load of stuff in the cellar over the holidays and I’d been dumped there as usual, only boy left in the place, so I was giving them a hand. They were just throwing it all in the furnace, old text books and lost property and I saw this go in. I had to save it, I didn’t even think, or know what it was, I just had to save it.”  
The eyes flicked back to the book again. Ethan turned it in his hand, showing the fire marks.   
“I felt something the minute I touched it, and not just the fire. Like the minute bit of a second before you get an electric shock and you know it’s coming. Only the shock never comes. I’ve felt it all my life, when I’m sleeping and eating and waking, doing anything. Something in the air all around me only I can’t see it or touch it or smell it and no one else seems to know it’s there. It’s wrapped around your tongue -”  
The eyes shot back to him at that from the book, the face looked almost surprised but Ethan carried on. If he stopped for too long he may lose where this is going and never know what he meant to say.  
“A world behind a curtain and last night, everyone else – well everyone but Randall anyway – saw it too. And you know all about it, you could tell me, everything you know, where to find out what you don’t, but you won’t, because you don’t care. You want them to come and show you how pissed off they are. We undo you and you go and stand in front of the next train. And where does that leave me?”  
Exposed, horribly exposed, that’s where. Admitting that he wanted something, needed something. Ethan watched as Giles’ mouth slid into a smile, different from before but just as terrible; humourless, mocking and amused.  
“th’Think (y)you’ve g’g’got tt’t’time ffor all I kkknow, (b)b’fore th’this e’e’evening”  
“What if I can give you longer? Do you know what this book is?” Ethan turn it over to the front’s piece so it showed the title. It’s got spells in it, for all sorts, there’s this one for concealment for people who are been persued, ‘The Hunted’s Cloak.’ It says in the introduction -”  
“Are they actually talking about this bollocks?”  
“Shut up, Randall!” The admonishment came in chorus. Ethan carried on, flicking through the pages until he came to the same one as in the shop this morning:  
“It says it can hide you, from enemies. Only it’s not in any sort of English I understand. I’ve tried saying the sounds out on some of the other pages but nothing happens. So you explain to me, how to make it work, what I’m doing wrong and I’ll give you something better than oblivion. I’ll make it so that tablets and pills and all the drink in the world are nothing. You want to die? I’ll take you there in ways you’ve never imagined. I’ll push you over the cliff and entertain you as you go, you’ll never want to stop falling.”  
The room was very quiet. The green eyes still looked at him, assessing, but Ethan could tell that Giles was thinking about it, really thinking about it.  
“I don’t know if I like that.” Dee’s voice broke the quiet. “I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing you should make a deal about. What exactly are you going to give him Ethie?”  
“I don’t know,” Ethan admitted. He didn’t, he’d caught up with his mind as the words came out. “But I’ll think of something.”  
He would as well. The words had come out but he wasn’t frightened by them or shocked, he was certain. It slotted like another building block in his mind; I meant it, I can do it. I want to do it.  
The chained up hand reached towards Ethan. The smile lost it’s mocking but not it’s amusement, not it’s terrible edges. Then again, it was a terrible deal, in the true, old meaning of the word. But it had worked and Ethan wasn’t sorry. He very rarely, if ever, was.  
“G’g’g’give (mm)me th’the b’book.”


	3. Three

Ethan slipped the book between the chained up hands. It was the first time he’d ever shown anyone it, ever, not counting the time that Randall stole it. For a second he was worried that everyone was going to suddenly burst out laughing, that they’d been making a joke of him, but the hands eased the book a little between themselves and the green eyes moved across as they read.  
“Tommy, I’m really not sure about this.”  
“I know Bird, but they want to make a deal of some sort it’s up to them.”  
The eyes finished reading the page. He was quick, for all the tightly-packed, dense type, the double page had taken hardly any time.  
“You can read it then?” Ethan tried to not sound so hopeful. He had thought that maybe the other man would know what Ethan was doing wrong but he’d never thought that he might actually be able to read the pages. There was a nod:  
“yyYes, i’i’it’s p’p’pre-Norman cConquest e’e’leventh c‘century e’e’English.” The fingers quickly rolled a page over. “th’This (oo)one i’i’isn’t though, i’its m’more l’ike n’nn’nnninth c’century -”  
Ethan interrupted him.  
“More interested in the other page at the moment, we can go through the others later. Can we undo him, Tommy? I do think it will prove more useful if he can roam around unleashed, so to speak.”  
“You sure, Ethan?” Tommy asked him. Ethan looked down, the eyes were furiously scanning the book again, more alive than they’d been this whole time.  
“Yes. I’m sure.”  
“Okay then.”  
Dee was worried, Ethan could tell, she was flittering around on the spot, rubbing her thumbs on her palms, but he couldn’t think about it too much right now. He would do, later, but not now. Tommy reached into his jacket and pulled out his keyring, not so foolish as to get too near the fire-place without caution.  
“I’ll undo you, just don’t kick the shit out of me, okay? Hey, okay?” he added after there was no answer. The eyes were reading the pages again.  
“yyYes, (oo)o’kay.”  
The padlock was stopping the chain from going through the grate. The chain had been long enough, at least, that the fire they had lit to boil the water for washing hadn’t heated it to the end around the hands; after his childhood experiences Tommy had checked that. It had, though, filled the little key hole with ash. He blew on it and fitted the key, removing the padlock so that the clip on the end of the lead could pass through the metal of the grate. Still cautious despite the assurances, he unwound the chain from around the hands, Ethan protectively moving the book out of the way. The belts were harder, the piss that had soaked the blankets had also wet the leather and it was one thing trussing a man up like this when he was unconscious, another thing to undo it when he’s conscious and watching you. It was far from the first naked man Tommy had seen – he’d been living in squats since he fourteen and was currently in a room with three other blokes – but it was the first one he had ever tied up, with or without permission. He managed it eventually and held out Phil’s belt to him.  
“You want this back?”  
“Nah mate, chuck it.”  
The belts went out the window. Ethan held the book back out.  
“Do you need this, or shall I keep it with me? I’ve got some of the ingredients already but I can go and get the rest now.”  
“y’y’’y -”  
He couldn’t do it. Ethan saw the look of frustration cross over the face as the sounds just wouldn’t realise.  
“Nod for me keep it, shake for you.”  
Giles nodded.  
“Excellent, thank you. And can we do this here, or do we need to be somewhere else? Again, you can just nod, if it’s easier. Can we do it here?”  
Again, Giles nodded.  
“And do I need anything else that’s not in the ingredients bit?”  
Nod.  
“What?”  
Ethan saw the eye’s roll at him and he had to admit, that one was pretty impossible to answer with just nods and shakes. To his surprise, Giles opened his mouth and spoke fluently. Unfortunately it wasn’t in English. It was French, Ethan’s mind told him usefully, though less usefully failed to provide a translation.  
“Ah, yes, I rather failed to pay attention to quite a lot of school.”  
“He said chalk,” said Deidre. “That’s right, isn’t it?” and she broke into French as well, seemingly also if not fluent then at least conversant. The conversation went between them for a minute or so, then she turned back to Ethan. “He said you need chalk, red preferably, though any will do. And candles, you’ll need six and another belt or a scarf or anything really that can tie two things together. And a knife, a really sharp one. He speaks beautiful French, not a single stammer.”  
“Apparently so do you.”  
“Yes, of course, I’m extremely talented, in many areas. You boys are very lucky to have me.”  
“Yeah, we are,” said Tommy, and with a very non-cherubic grin, “I've personally experienced some of those areas.”  
She smiled too, her worry about the deal Ethan had struck not so much receding as becoming assimilated into her. She would carry on not thinking it was a good idea, and she would carry on worrying about it, but that would not be allowed to engulf everything else.  
“Do you need him to tell you anything else?”  
“No, I’ll go and get these things together.”  
Ethan felt exposed, like he was the one who was naked, he’d stood in-front of them all and said all those things. But none of them were laughing at him, not even Randall, though that was probably because he was too busy rubbing his head like it was hurting him, belly ache seemingly forgotten. Even so, Ethan wanted to get out for a while, regain a bit of his composure. He put the book back in his pocket and made for the shopping bags they’d used at the supermarket earlier. As he did, he shouted over to Randall, unable to not get the first retaliation in, just in case Randall was thinking of making some dumb comment about what had just gone on.  
“Your stomach’s that bit between your chest and your dick, Randall. I can get you some more medicine whilst I’m out, or do you find yourself suddenly cured?” Randall scowled at him, which pleased Ethan enormously. He turned back to the fireplace where Giles was still sitting, in fact he hadn’t moved at all except to draw his legs back to him after Tommy had freed them. “I’ll be back soon. I’d say don’t go anywhere but as you’re completely naked, and as we have made a deal, I don’t think I need to worry.”  
“You need us to do anything?” asked Phil, turning from adding the dog lead and the padlock to the pile in the yard as Randall didn’t want them back.  
“No, thank you all the same. Back in a bit.”  
He turned quickly and made his way down the stairs. He heard Randall say he was going to bed, he wasn’t feeling well. They were already starting to lose the light and the staircase was filling up with shadows. Randall came out onto the landing as Ethan slipped down into darkness. He allowed his usual saunter to quicken a-pace. He’d have to hurry if they were going to get this done before the evening came.

Deidre would never admit it to the boys, but the reason that she spoke such excellent French was that she had spent every Saturday and Sunday of her teenage years washing dishes in the French restaurant her cousin cleaned at. The only non-French speaker in the kitchen, she had found herself unconsciously picking it up, so that when it came to take a few French lessons at school it had come easy to her. In fact, she had found she already knew quite a lot of it, secreted away in some handy spot in her mind. She was good enough by the time she was fifteen to be seduced, completely in French, by the middle son of the maître d’ and they’d both overcome their virginity together in a rather fumbling and quick few minutes of passion in the place the restaurant kept the kitchen bins.  
The reason she wouldn’t tell the boys this wasn’t because it held any kind of traumatic or embarrassed memory for her. Indeed, she had found the seduction extremely thrilling. It was because the story could never be quite as good as the intrigue and because she wouldn’t put it past Phil and Tommy to track the young man down and give him their thoughts on his choice of romantic venue for her seminal moment. Rather hypercritical when both of them frequently made extremely charming love to her in a rat infested squat over a rubbish hoarder but they were romantic boys at heart and she made allowances for it.  
“Ask him if we should do anything,” Phil said to her, nodding his head towards Giles.  
Phil wasn’t stupid, in-fact he was probably cleverer than Tommy who was no idiot, but sometimes Dee wondered if the blood took too long to get to his head, like some sort of thought altitude sickness. He could be a bit behind, which caused people who really were stupid to make the mistake of taunting him about it.  
“Phil darling, you can ask him in English, I think it’s just easier for him to answer in French.”  
“Oh, yeah, right.”  
Tommy grinned a bit, but not unkindly.  
“Or if he’s only semi-conscious,” added Dee, “though I don’t think we should knock him back out or anything just so he can talk to us. That would be a bit extreme, don’t you think?” She addressed the last part at Giles and smiled at him but he didn’t respond. He still looked tired, his hand came up to rub his face, finger tips grinding into the lids of his gritty eyes. The purple viscera fragments in the scruffy beard had hardened, as had what had fallen in his hair though the wet from the rain had at least allowed most of it to slide off first. Phil went a little bit nearer to the fireplace, like Tommy still keeping a cautious distance.  
“You need us to do anything mate, to help you set up?”  
Giles shook his head.  
“How about some clothes?” asked Dee. “You’re extremely lovely and we don’t mind naked at all but you must be cold. Have you two got anything you can lend?”  
“Not that will fit him, no.”  
This was true, size wise he was somewhere between Phil and Tommy and like neither of them in physique. Tommy was average for height, with good basic muscles which he sometimes threw a few press ups and exercises at to help maintain. Phil was not only tall, but proportionally big with it, as though a decent size, broad bodied line-backer had been enlarged to scale and then placed back into the original-sized world. He was strong by the co-incidence of his size, muscled by the amount of things he had to move around to fit into spaces others easy occupied and though he ate everything in sight he carried no fat. Both he and Tommy already drank slightly too much, smoked slightly too much, enjoyed other stimulating substances and ate mainly what they could steal and afford, which was crap. Compared to a 5ft9” wiry fighter with the body of a fencer they had little to no meeting point.  
“We’ll go get him something.” Tommy changed his mind as soon as he said it. “Actually Phil, you go, it doesn’t need both of us.”  
“He’s not going to hurt me.”  
“Yeah, well,” said Tommy and left it at that.  
“Okay, I’ll see what I can find. What size are you mate?”  
Again that struggle in the mouth, the sounds that wouldn’t come out.  
“I can tell him,” said Dee, “just say it to me.”  
French again, she translated.  
“Got it,” said Phil, “won’t be long.”  
Tommy picked up one of the chairs by its back and placed it down near the fire, straddling it backwards so he could lean on the wood.  
“Dee,” he said, though kept looking forward, “why don’t you go and see if Mrs Atkinson will give us some water? I’m sure your Guy-That-Rips-The-Heads-Off-Things wants a wash.”  
“It’s Ripping-The-heads-Off-Things-Guy, actually and Mrs Atkinson will be in bed by now. She’s very old Tommy, she only gets up to shout disapproving things at people as they go to work. But I’ll find some.”  
It was getting darker outside the window. Dee reached for the spare lamp and checked it for oil. She saw Tommy pull out his cigarettes and knock one partly out the packet.  
“You smoke?”  
Nod.  
He flipped the cigarette over and it was caught.  
“Light,” said Tommy and threw that too, holding his palm up to show he expected it straight back. It was thrown back. They both pulled at the smoke, looking at the other. Two dogs sitting near enough to fight or be friends, neither too sure which it was yet.  
Dee put as many bottles as she could fit into one of her many, capacious, bags. She could always get water from Frank at the shop. All she had to do in return for it was pay the amount the boys had short changed him by during the week. Dee considered this a fair deal, after all he never charged her for the things he knew they stole as well. She put the bag on her shoulder and, lifting the light, left the two boys to it.

Ethan had a good memory which is why he didn’t need to read the ingredients again after doing so this morning at the shop. He did anyway, making it to the nearest working street light as it blinked on. He was nervous, energy running through him like an alcoholic shot. He leant against the pole and turned to the page again.  
‘The Hunted’s Cloak.  
A spell to protect a person from enemy or enemies in both physical and magical pursuits. Both pursued and pursuer must be human, this spell having no effect of demonic entities or non-human life forms. It is thought this may be a variant of the much older incantation ‘The Righteous Shall Flee In Peace,’ which lost its effectiveness after the collapse of the Demonic Circle of Nee in the 1st century A.D,. Scholars of English spell casting argue, however, that it is an entirely independent piece, having none of the ritual complexity favoured by the Circle but instead the simplicity and raw nature of the middle and late English magics of c 650 to 1066. It can also be used by any, righteous or not, in which it does deviate in a significant way from the older incantation which could only by used by those of pure purpose.  
The earliest written recording in a spell diary from 1252, some two hundred years after the spells assumed origins, calls for Sleep-by-The-Day. This first example preserves all other aspect of the earlier language so it is thought that this is a localised name for a herb or flower that induced sleepiness or drowsing. No other reference to this name can be found and what exact plant this is remains unknown. Experiments have shown that other herbs and flora which give similar effects are compatible, especially Flower of Thannery, Wiley-Way, Sessions Knot and Verbannion.  
Ingredients: Sleep-By-The-Day, Salt, Water, Blood of the pursued, the eyes of a flying bird (dead or living), the tongue of a dog (dead or living), one cloak of good cloth.’  
Not a long list, even without a good memory it would be hard to forget any of it. He read it again anyway to be sure before sliding the book away. There was nowhere in this part of London to start buying herbs and flowers this late in the day, none that he knew of anyway. He had to hope that the bottle from this morning would work. They had salt in the food box, he had an idea about the cloak which left just the eyes and tongues.  
One of the other few things that Ethan would admit to, aside from liking Dee and been no good at physical fights, was that he was squeamish. Not about everything, and he wasn’t really a lover of all things fluffy per se, but at the thought of gauging an eye ball out he felt his himself pull a face. Was he so desperate to find out about things that he’d take something’s eye’s out? Yes, he was, though he didn’t like the thought of doing it much. Was he desperate enough that he’d take them out of a thing that was still using them? He had to admit it, yes, he was, however he didn’t know if he physically could. The only real option was to try for the already dead.  
He’d start with the bird, that would be the easiest. He once again returned the book to the pocket and crossed back over the street, running almost head long into Dee as she turned the corner.  
“Hello, are you done already?”  
“No, just using the street light. Are you going anywhere in particular?”  
“The shop, Tommy thought Ripping-The-Heads-off-Things-Guy should have a wash, so I’m getting water. Should probably get a cloth as well, ours are all dirty.”  
“Good, get more salt as well?”  
“Salt? Anything else.”  
“Yes, but I doubt Frank sells it. Ah, yes, chalk, see if he has that.”  
He stood aside but she didn’t pass.  
“Are you really sure Ethan that you want to do this? Not the spell, I don’t mean that, I have no idea if things like that really work or not. But promises do, and bargains. I just think that when you strike a deal like that, it’s sort of hard to undo. Are you sure this is the way you want to do things?”  
“I think it’s the only way we can do them. Yes. I’m sure Dee.”  
“Alright then.” She straightened her shoulders. “Then let’s do magic. With salt. I’m sure it will be exciting whatever happens.”  
He waited for her to go a few paces then carried on himself, heading for the empty houses beside the squat. The one that had burned had lost its roof and the charred joist timbers made a great roosting spot for the birds, as did the exposed floor beams. Whatever decoration the house had originally had, there was now always a carpet of shit and feathers and birds in various stages of decomposition. Hopefully one would still have its eyes.  
He stood at the boarded up window and realised he should have taken Dee’s light. He could go back up into the squat for one but for some reason he didn’t want to return there until he was ready. He felt hot energy buzzing through him, he bounced on his toes. It didn’t take him long to run after Dee and negotiate the lamp off her.  
The boarding on the windows was still intact on the burned house. He went instead to the next house along, the door long since missing, the pile of litter in the doorway squashed flat and dispersed enough over the inside floor that it wasn’t so much a question of stepping ‘over’ but ‘onto.’ The doors of the rooms had also long gone. In the equivalent of the room occupied by Mr Dodgekins, there was a group of pre-teenaged boys playing cards by candle light, pictures of naked women on the cards and cigarettes burning on their cola cans.  
“Piss off freak-man,” said one of them who Ethan choose to ignore, gliding past the door to the staircase. The treads were missing on some of them but he was aware of it and made it to the top without falling through. Upstairs the roof was partially burned off from the fire next door and where the two houses shared a wall there had been some collapse from the falling timber. Checking the floor with the lantern for bricks and rubbish he picked his way across and held the lamp through the gap. There was no first floor at all, just the beams opening up into the dark opening of the room below. Ethan lowered the lantern but there was just the vague suggestion of a surface somewhere down there. He couldn’t tell how far it was from looking, he knew it had to be, at the most, the height of the downstairs rooms in their own place and less than that if the accumulation of debris on the floor had piled significantly up. He had looked down in the day time once, but never with the thought of jumping down.  
In fact, jumping down was probably extremely stupid, his thoughts supplied. Better to lower yourself, or to drop.  
He sat down on the sturdiest looking bit of the divider wall, which was where it was lowest. It added about a foot; the rooms downstairs at the squat were shorter than the upstairs ones at a height of considerably less than ‘one Phil,’ or about 6ft. That left about a 7ft drop which was doable. Totally doable.  
He’d very nearly almost dropped down before he realised that he would have to get out again by the same distance. Feeling a wave of relief that he had realised it then and not half way down, he carefully twisted himself around from the drop. He would have to find a ladder or something, or maybe he could convince Phil to go down, it was really only a little drop and a jump for him. Or maybe –  
His thoughts racing Ethan held the lantern ahead of him and started to make his way back over the floor. It was a slightly different route. He’d done about four steps when the light fell on the sprawl-winged body of a dead pigeon.  
“Ah!” said Ethan, pleased, “excellent.”  
It didn’t look too long dead either and most importantly it still had its eyes. The top one anyway, the head was flopped sideways in death and he’d have to flip it over to check the other. He pushed the toe of his boot under the neck and wiggled, the weight of the head sagged down a bit as he lifted and he had to hop around as he moved against the movement of the lolling head but, yes, eyes in both sides. Pleased, Ethan thought about the removing them part but decided he had been brave enough for the moment. He turned the shopping back inside out over his hand and used it pick up the pigeon, turning the bag back over it so it ended up inside. Fighting the urge to hold the bag as far out in front of him as possible he lifted the lantern and headed for the stairs.  
Just the dog tongue to go and fortunately he knew just the place to get one. 

Phil could only think of one place to get clothes from this late in the afternoon. Especially as he had no money to spend on them and, that judging from the number of people getting off the bus on the main road, it was after five-thirty.  
If you’d asked him yesterday morning if he believed in demons and monsters he would have said no. Not since he was old enough to know that the scary things in the world weren’t monsters under the bed but people. That realisation had come when he was eight when the local debt collector, who was also his uncle, had left him waiting by someone’s front door while he went in to break their knee caps. His uncle was also a big man, well over 6ft, and when Phil had kept growing and growing he’d worried that he’d end up the debt collector too. He’d found out that he actually did enjoy fighting, especially when it gave him a chance to smash up those who thought big meant stupid. He’d even broken someone’s knee once though not deliberately and not because the poor sod had owed some loan shark money. He’d stamped the guy on the knee when they were fighting and his weight had come down in just the right place and that was that. Crunch.  
His uncle had starting making hints that his boss was always looking for lads like him. He’d got out the house before he’d had to think of a way out of the offer. His mum was only too glad to see him go, not from any lack of affection for him but because she had seven other kids, all of them thankfully more normal size, and not having to feed him would come as a relief. He never went round to see her, she would only remind him that her brother could still get him that job. Phil had known enough about the loan shark to know he’d be better off just breaking his own knees now to save someone else the trouble later on. It was why he was glad when he bumped into Tommy again. Tommy was one of the few locals his age who hadn’t thought he was some thick shit and Tommy fought and Tommy stomped on knees too, but he never made you do it for him and he never tried to make it into a job.  
Last night had shown him that there were other kinds of demons out there, aside from uncles and petty crime lords. He know what he saw on the staircase, he’d always believed his own eyes since his uncle had come back out that house whistling like it was just another day on the job. If the guy that could rip the head off that demon acted like Ethan was talking sense about magic, or at least didn’t seem to think that it was something out the ordinary for Ethan to start asking him about, then maybe magic was real too. Phil would certainly be willing to bet on it. He hoped it was, he was open to the world been more than the surface that men like his uncle inhabited.  
He opened the door to the launderette. Several of the big washers were turning and there was a few service loads on the counter waiting for home time collection. The woman behind the counter gave him a looking over but they were in here often enough that she recognised him. He was the sort that it was hard to forget. He slipped into the back where the dryers were. Two were spinning but four were still, two of them with stuff in and there were some mounds on the sorting table as well. If you’re stupid enough to leave your stuff unattended then you could expect to get it taken out the dryer or nicked. Phil knew his uncle would say that if you were stupid enough to borrow money from a loan shark and not pay it back then you deserved to get your knuckles rapped or broken. To Phil there was a difference and if he’d had to express it, it would be one of scale. Knee caps are knee caps, where as a pair of jeans were a pair of jeans. He only had one pair of jeans, which is why when he washed them he stood by the machines until they were done. Walk off and leave them then you really were either stupid or flush enough to afford a second pair. No one can afford a second pair of knee caps.  
He opened the first dryer but it was a mixture of women’s and kid’s stuff. The second was men’s but too small, he turned and rummaged through the piles on the table. The best he could do was a pair of jeans, a size or so too big, and a grey t-shirt and chunky brown jumper, same. Better too big than too small, he reckoned. At least the stuff would go on and it wasn’t so big it would just fall straight back off again.  
He hoped that their new friend back at the squat would think the same. Phil was sensibly cautious of him rather than afraid but as the nephew of a professional leg breaker he could recognise talent in violence and that guy had it. Probably best not to start off by pissing him off, any more than they already had by stripping him and tying him to the fire grate. Phil thought that he should probably point that out to Randall too, before the new guy did it for himself.  
He shoved the clothes inside his coat and, taking a tip from his uncle about the normalcy of crime, whistled as he went out. The woman behind the service counter carried on folding and didn’t even look up. 

Dee had watched as Giles washed. He’d moved slowly, stiff from been bound all night, still sore in mind and body. She didn’t see it as voyeuristic; he was washing, she was boiling water, tipping the used stuff out the window as he scrubbed and scrubbed. The purple stains as stubborn on his skin as hers. Tommy had thought to pocket razors at the supermarket earlier, she’d handed one over with the shaving foam;  
“It’s all in your beard, I think you’ll have to shave to get it off, you don’t mind do you?”  
He shook his head, took the razor. It was a safety one, the disposable sort you can use a few times then change the blade. Hard for him to do damage to himself, but still, Dee watched him. So did Tommy, coinciding the razor been handed out with him counting six candles out the box and putting the chairs against the wall. It was like setting up for a party, a surprise party where you had no idea what was going to happen.  
The beard growth came off, the foam and he was handsome, not classically so but his face had something about it. It suited clean shaven, or perhaps just suited not been covered in day old gore and piss. They had no towels so she gave him one of her jumpers to dry himself on -  
“th’th’thanks,”  
\- and Phil made an appearance with clean clothes, pulling them out of his coat like the warm up act for the later conjuring show. Giles pulled the clothes on gratefully, he was shivering from the cold of the room and the washing. The large, turn-over collar of the jumper stood against his neck and he pushed his hands to it, arms pulled up close to his chest. He wasn’t comfortable with them. Dee could see that, it was a new situation for all of them, it was hard for it not to be odd.  
“I’m nervous,” she admitted. Tommy gave a half nod but nobody said anything. They stood around in silence, waiting for what was about to happen, waiting for the party to begin and shout ‘surprise.’ Dee had that feeling that it was some sort of moment, a time when you choose one event over the other but can have no idea at the time which way it would turn out. She could go now, just walk out and find another place, the city was full of people, they’d be others out there who’d welcome her, fuck her, love her, entertain her and find ways to make her days bright. It wouldn’t be these boys though.  
And she would always, wonder, wouldn’t she, if Ethan had been right? If there really was another world behind a curtain. Life was to be experimented with and gambled, life was for finding the ways to cover over the great black voids, even if it was with something as paper thin as a moment. That way you couldn’t fall in. That way, even if you fell, you took something bright and shinning with you, to keep by you in the dark. She could walk out the door and go another way but she didn’t want to.  
She breathed out into the tension of the room,  
“How about some wine? I’m sure we’ve got some left from dinner, I’ll get it - ”  
“No time Deidre!” Ethan swept into the room, holding the shopping bag out in-front of him, energy bouncing out of him so that it seemed to hit the walls, explode the tension of the room out. Dee felt the weight on her chest lighten completely, there was no fear now, only nervous excitement, only a sort of giddy joy that tonight might contain something truly different. Ethan put the bag down in the centre of the room. No longer at the edge or the back, this seemed utterly the right place for him to be.  
“Grab that new coat of yours will you?” he said. “We’re about to begin.”

Ethan bounced on his toes in the middle of the room and felt alive. It was impossible for him to supress his mood, to maintain even a hint of his usual sardonic aloofness. He felt exposed again, naked, if this worked tonight he’d have to reign it in a bit, get on top of it. He could go through life feeling this energised but not this vulnerable. If tonight didn’t work, if he’d put himself so far out there and this turned out just to be some kind of joke from the universe, he didn’t know how he’d cope with that.  
He felt everyone staring at him.  
“This is the bit where you tell us what to do,” hinted Tommy.  
“Ah, yes, right.” He had no idea what to do, that had been the entirety of the problem for years. “Ripping-Things-Heads-Off-Guy, over to you.”  
The hands inside the brown jumper collar rubbed against the neck. He stood like a fighter, poised, like Ethan was poised, to move, but without Ethan’s waste of energy. Tired, cold, still cowed, he shifted the balance of his feet, just once, and spoke French to Dee.  
“He says have you got the things on the list?”  
They were produced. Chalk and salt from Dee, candles from Tommy, a very sharp knife in the form of the bread knife from the box.  
“I rather need someone to take the eyes out of this bird.”  
“Oh no, Ethan, that’s horrible.”  
Neither Phil or Tommy jumped forward.  
“Tommy can do it,” volunteered Phil, “he kills rats.”  
“I might kill them but I don’t poke around at them after. You can do it,” he countered at Phil, “you’re a big brave boy.”  
“It’s already dead,” added Ethan in case that helped.  
“Seriously, do we have to do that?” Dee looked towards Giles, who nodded. “Oh, well if we have to. And if it’s already dead.”  
Seeing that no one else was going to do it for him, Ethan put the bag on the floor and tipped out the bird. It was doable, not pleasant but doable. The excitement, the energy of his anticipation was enough to override the thoughts of cold squishy eye balls and attachments. He was quite fascinated by how big the eyes were outside of the confines of the socket. Even though it curled his face up in distaste, he was able to look at them quite closely after he took them out. He put them in an ashtray hurriedly cleared of butts by Tommy then tipped the bag up once more for the tongue.  
“Man, that’s disgusting,” said Tommy, crouching down for a better look. “Is that a tongue.”  
“No, Ethan, really?”  
“Once again already dead, Dee.”  
Tommy got out his knuckle dusters to give it a prod.  
“Where the hell you get that from?”  
“A donation, from Mr Dodgekins’ squashed dog.”  
Which Ethan was hoping Mr Dodgekins wouldn’t find out about. Or about the spare key to his padlock that they’d put on top of his door frame where the frame and the plaster gaped. Mr Dodgekins might not like people touching his stuff but no one else in the house liked everything to be covered in mice and rat piss, or just in the rodents themselves. A few you could put up with, living as they did, a bowl of rat poison down amongst the junk every week or so made sure it stayed a few. Ethan approved of their rodent numbers management policy and Mr Dodgekins working out they were getting in to his room would put a stop to it.  
The tongue and eyes were put with the other things. Giles looked them over from his spot by the wall.  
“le manteau?”  
“He says ‘the coat?’ Is that why you asked my for mine.”  
“Yes, it has to be a good one you see, it says so.”  
He wasn’t sure if she was going to make a fuss or not. Dee was a generous person, generous with her body, her spirit and her things. Though she loved to pick up anything that amused her and pleased her – from a bangle to a person - and to scatter her physical world with stimulus, in the event of a fire she would run and grab a person to rescue, not a thing. Ethan hadn’t known her long, he was beginning to understand this about her, but he didn’t know her well enough yet to always predict her. It was also a really good coat.  
“If a bird can give its eyes and a dog can give it’s tongue, I can give a coat.” She said this extremely magnificently. “Phillip, would you retrieve my sacrifice from my room, you’ll find it hanging from the window frame.”  
“Is this everything, will it all do?” asked Ethan, trying to hide his nervous, still unable to supress his excitement and high level of anxious hope.  
Giles nodded and moved slowly away from the wall to the pile. Picking up the little box of coloured chalk he tipped them up and tapped one out, much like Tommy had done earlier with the cigarettes. He pulled the red one free of the others and stepped back, crouching down on the clear surface of the floor. He looked at Ethan for a moment, as though he was wondering if he should tell him something, then he reached his arm out and drew a large circle on the floor. He drew it going around him, so he was crouching roughly in the centre, moving around with the chalk as he drew, the chalk bumping and dusting against the un-level boards. It wasn’t the most exact of circles but it would do. His open hand reached out towards Ethan.  
“(b)b’ook,” he said, a statement rather than a question. Ethan hold told him that he didn’t care if he said please or not, so he couldn’t complain about that. Handing it over, Ethan turned it to the correct page. Phil added Dee’s white and silver coat to the pile and the four of them stood, watching intently as some symbols were added at what would be the compass points. Giles took the salt and poured a small pile of it into the circle, then cut his palm with the knife and pressed it to the floorboards there. Ethan was dying to ask him what he was doing, and why, and where in the book it said to do it. If he asked though, the answer would have to be translated through Dee or through the frustration of that stutter. They’d have to do something about that, something that was easier than Ethan learning French. Besides, it obviously frustrated Giles, he seemed tied up with his hunched up body and demeanour. His whole body, his whole personality is caught in a stammer, thought Ethan. It needed releasing.  
Giles carefully stepped out of the circle. Speaking to Dee again he gave, what seemed to Ethan, a long list of instructions. Dee’s face concentrated as she listened.  
“Right, he says to put the coat and the tongue and the eyes and the stuff in the bottle in the circle he’s just drawn – but not the ash tray and the bottle, tip them out, then you’ve got to sit on the floor to this side of it Ethie. If you sit and circle your arms around you and you don’t quite reach the other circle, you’re in about the right place. Tommy, Phil can you light the candles and put one at each compass point, and put one unlit in the circle and one where Ethan is sitting. I think that was everything. Was it, Ripping-Things darling?  
He nodded.  
“Thrilling,” she said, the excitement shining on her face. “What’s next?”  
Ethan sat by the circle, trying not to feel like a kid swinging his arms in the playground. He saw Giles’ bare feet come towards him, then the chalk went to the floor again and a second circle was drawn around them. Giles sat in the circle with him, staring at him, their crossed legs almost grazing, knee to knee. They sat there together doing nothing but looking at one another, breathing, nervous. The eyes didn’t move as Giles took a deep breath, once again starting giving instructions to Dee. Ethan sat, frustrated as Dee spoke back in French, he could feel the tension pulling through him amongst the excitement.  
“He says to tell you that the reason nothing happened when you read the words before is because you don’t understand them, that you’ve got to know what they mean. So he’s going to have to say the words and you’re going to provide the magic. I’m not too sure how you do that darling, I’m sure we’ll find out. And, there was more…”  
The tension pulled inside Ethan as she paused to remember. She picked up her wine glass and took a sip and couldn’t she feel that tension? Ethan felt it pulling in him like a tightening muscle.  
“Oh, yes, that’s right, there’s some things you’ve got to do in a set order, because you’re doing the spell really, he’s just giving you the words.”  
“Well, what are they?” demanded Ethan.  
“I don’t know, he hasn’t told me that bit yet.”  
Ethan felt the stare move off him, sat there again as the conversation went back and forth in French. Tommy pulled a chair out and sat on it, Phil went to see if Randall wanted to join in the fun and still the French went on. Phil returned, no Randall, and took the chair next to Tommy, pulling out a chocolate bar, an audience waiting for the show to begin. Finally they finished talking and Ethan listened to the detailed instructions given by Dee, checked by Giles as he confirmed or corrected and for a moment Ethan’s head felt horribly empty, a big space that the words had vanished through; he couldn’t remember.  
“Y’y’y’you (g)g’ got it?”  
Ethan shut his eyes, the words came back, filling the big white space.  
“Yes. I’ve got it.”  
Dee took her wine glass and sat on the floor in-front of the two boys, resting against their legs.  
“Curtain up,” said Tommy.

Hemston sat on the unmade bed with tape across his nose looking pissed off. All of them looked worse for the fight with exception of Travers, whose only sign that he had been in an altercation was a rumpled shirt and boot-print to the trouser fabric of his thigh. Rather than see this as a positive – that he had managed to fight off a bunch of slightly drunk thugs with little to no injury to himself, as you would rather expect from a member of the Council’s Operatives Team – Stanleys was using it as a platform for a chastisement that had been going on all day.  
“Did you even engage in the fight at all Travers?”  
had been the starting comment and it had gone on from there. As far as Travers could make out, he, Travers, was to blame for the entire cock-up of an operation because, after the other four men had been incapacitated he had failed to then single-handedly take on and defeat the three men and the half-naked woman who had in-capacitated them. He had also then failed to pick up their OD’ing target and remove him from the premises whilst also dealing with the decapitated body of a Rathma-Lorgennes Demon (a species of demon until that night thought extinct for four centuries) and the aforementioned incapacitated men.  
The rest of the team seemed inclined to side with Stanleys on this one but, despite this, Travers was taking it well. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, that Stanleys was, in the opinion of Travers, a first-class arse. Second, that he would be embarrassed too if he was a member of an Operatives Team – usually tasked with dealing physically with vampires, demons and related activities, from dispatching and fighting them as best could, to scene clean up – and had been beaten up by said slightly drunk thugs. Third that he was, unbeknownst to Stanleys, actually attached to the team to perform an internal review and would, when back at the Council, quite happily annihilate him. Travers agreed that they needed to bring Giles back in, he thought the Inner Council right that they should do it by force if necessary because once they got the boy back they could work out what was wrong; they couldn’t do that whilst Giles was bolting around the country having what sounded like a nervous breakdown. Force to Travers meant making sure the boy came with them. It didn’t mean kicking the door in and dragging him off after a lecture. The problem with the Operatives was that they were too used to dealing with, and fighting with, the un-dead. Clearly something had happened on the staircase and even more clearly there was something deeply wrong with young Giles and now, thanks to Stanleys the situation was just that little bit worse. Once again they had no idea where Giles was.  
After he had got everyone back in the van last night, Travers had got the body and head of the Rathma-Lorgennes Demon in as well. Rathma-Lorgennes Demons, if Travers remembered correctly from a friend who studied extinct demonic forms as a hobby, exploded four to six hours after death releasing toxic spores. The only way to stop it was to slowly burn the body of the demon, which destroyed the spores. Stanleys, re-focussing after a slight concussion just as Travers was pulling up at a telephone box, had refused to let Travers call another team in to come and deal with it.  
“We clean up Demons, Mr Travers, we will handle it.”  
“I know that Sir, but I do think that it would be best if we let another team do that whilst we concentrate on Giles. If we leave it too long there’s every possibility that Giles will be gone, or come to some serious harm from overdosing - ”  
“He is not overdosing,” interrupted Stanleys, “he’s drunk like his delinquent friends and I have better things to do than go around collecting drunk little boys who have run away from home.”  
“I think it’s more serious than that Sir, Giles is on the List Of Entesh, he’s the first Watcher in six hundred years to - ”  
“To have dreams connecting him directly to a Slayer, suggesting a time of a great Slayer or upheaval in the line, I know. I also read my brief ahead of this evening Travers. To which I say that I have better things to do than go around retrieving little boys who have had far too much attention paid on them for the last ten years because they eavesdropped on Daddy and Granny talking and had a nightmare. Now get back in the van, we have a demon to dispose of.”  
After he had managed to convince Stanleys about the spores, and after they had driven the two hours to the nearest Council disposal site with the facilities to burn a big enough fire, and after they had built said fire and slow cooked the demon down to bones and disposed of the ashes, it was already well into the next day. Back in London, the room in the flats had been empty apart from six pint glasses, the empty paper bag from the salt, an empty mustard pot and Giles’ stomach contents. Inquiries at the doors of the other flats and resulted in just six doors out of fifteen opening to them, none of which recognised the description of the thugs, nor even of the half-naked girl, who was pretty memorable. Finally realising that he was about to have to go and report back empty handed and defeated by civilians armed with knuckle dusters, knives and a pair of 34dd’s, Stanleys began to take the fact of Giles’ absence seriously. It wasn’t going to look good for him.  
“Collect up some of that vomit, Travers.”  
“Can I ask why sir?”  
“No you can’t ask blasted why, just do it. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you.”  
Thinking about just what suitable adjectives his report was going to include, Travers used the bag to scoop some of the sick into one of the pint glasses. Relieved as he was that they hadn’t found Giles dead in the room, he was starting to seriously wonder if he should call into Headquarters. Told to stay put with Wong and Hemston in case anyone came back to the room, he could only wait and compose the report in head whilst Hemston sat on the grotty bed and snorted out his bloody snot onto the floor. When Stanleys finally came back with what was definitely a non-Council wiccan, Travers knew that he should have found a way to ring anyway and that it was also probably too late.  
The darkness of the night and the brightness of the street light were growing together outside. The wiccan took out the pint glass containing the vomit, into which other substances had now been added.  
“That is the spot where he was last located,” said Stanleys, pointing to the rug.  
“Sir, what exactly are you doing?”  
“Be quiet Travers.”  
Travers watched as the wiccan got out chalk and candles, drew a circle around the rug and began to mark it. Stanleys handed her a London A to Z, open on the area, which was put in the circle. Travers had minimal knowledge of the occult beyond how to take basic precautions, it was not his area of expertise or a personal interest. He was, however, not an idiot.  
“You’re going to do a locator spell?”  
“Simplest way.”  
Why do I get the feeling that this is a bad idea? thought Travers. Probably because if it was a good one then Stanleys would just have called the on duty wiccan or mage at HQ.  
The wiccan finished the circle and looked at Stanleys.  
“And you’re sure that the man you’re looking for won’t be doing any sort of magic or be under any sort of magical protection?” her voice was raspy, like she smoked a lot or had damaged it at some point. “Because if so I’ll have to set up the extra protection layers and it will cost you -”  
“Hang the cost I don’t have the time! Find the man will you?”  
The Wiccan took been spoken to like that with the grace of one who works in the service industry, that is to say with silence but a slight suggestion that if they can, they will charge you extra. She sat down, after a while the chalk of the circle began to have a slight glow. Travers understood it did more than that, if you were inclined, but one of the reasons he found himself disinterested in magic was that to him nothing really happened. The result of course, that happened, he knew the magic worked, but to him it was like listening to a blank record that to some had music on it, he couldn’t hear the music, just the hiss of the needle.  
After nearly half an hour or so of the chalk glowing and the wiccan droning in her raspy voice just under the level audible to others, she reached out and tipped the pint glass over, pressing down on it over the map page. Again, nothing for Travers to see, until he noticed that the muscles on the woman’s arms were starting to tighten, like they were straining, then the pint glass began to vibrate. He could see that and hear the whine of it. Then, like on a ouija board or at a séance, the glass began to move, shooting sideways off the page, the wiccans’ other arm grabbed the A to Z, began flicking the pages rapidly in that hand. The glass shot forward, the flicking stopped and the vile contents in the glass began to flow under the up-turned rim, in a rivulet up onto the page. And that’s where it all went wrong.  
Because, in another room not too far away, every part of Ethan Rayne felt like laughing and laughing and laughing. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good, so filling, it filled every part of him and that strange force that he had never been able to see or touch or taste now danced inside him. It filled every pore and molecule of him, it touched him like water and warmed him like sun and it tasted purple and deep and wonderful. And even though he was utterly filled with that, to the point where there couldn’t be more of him to exist or to fill, he was also full of the green eyed boy sitting in front of him. Hands bound together, both palms cut to make a connection, the parts of the world that weren’t Ethan or magic were Him. He could even feel the joy and the surprise in the other boy, like he hadn’t been expecting it to feel like this, he could feel the boy’s shock, and yet wasn’t this normal? Surely this was how everyone felt, like they were the biggest thing in the world. And the boy made him bigger, like an amplifier. He felt the other boy’s finger tips curl around his in the confines of the binding and it was like getting the shock after the build-up. Yet still the magic made Ethan bigger and bigger, this circle was the whole world and Ethan was fine with that, there didn’t need to be more, there couldn’t be more. Then he felt the magic rush down, all the way down to something the size of a pin point, though it was no less, just concentrated, forceful. There was the call of a bird and the bark of a dog and the smell of a summer field of flowers that made you want to drowse and sleep in scented sun. The magic shot forward from the pin point, the candle in his hand blazed into flame, the circles flared. The white coat rose up above the circle like it had wings, then leaped like a dog then fell over the other boy’s shoulders where it burst into fire and burned. There was a scream from Dee but the fire burned outside the boy not into him. It sank and the circle died and the circle became a thing in the world not the world itself and Ethan thought how that could be despairing apart from the fact that it had left him so full. And between him and the boy something was still flowing and charging and Ethan felt utterly at peace and at home. He could sit here forever. In fact, he just might.  
It was a much different outcome for the wiccan in the flat, who could do no more than scream as the glass shattered and the bird took her eyes and the dog took her tongue. Opening her circle onto Ethan’s just as the spell took hold had hit her with its most powerful, potent version. Travers could only watch as she clutched at her face, the A to Z map burning as the circle flamed. She fell back and rushing over, Travers was relieved to find a pulse, she seemed to be sleeping, deep as a coma. For a second, Travers could smell summer fields, then the stench of the squalid room was back.  
One of the main adjectives he planned on using in his report, he decided, would be ‘cock-up.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More to follow, hopefully....


End file.
